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On the day he was murdered, Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to obtain the necessary paperwork to marry his second wife.  Of interest is information on his first wife and their children.  Also relevant are details of the relationship the Saudi government has with his children.    Details surrounding Khashoggi's death and subsequent investigations are not relevant. Saudi Arabia must be included in the document text.

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Jamal Khashoggi’s final months as an exile in the long shadow of Saudi Arabia

Jamal Khashoggi had been in the United States for only a few months when the forces he had fled in Saudi Arabia made clear that he would never fully escape.
He was at a friend’s home in suburban Virginia in October 2017 when his phone lit up with an incoming call from Riyadh. On the line was Saud al-Qahtani, a feared lieutenant of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
The royal heir and his henchman were at that point in the early stages of a brutal crackdown in the kingdom — arresting rivals, torturing enemies and silencing critics. Khashoggi had previously been banned from writing or even tweeting, but fear that worse could be in store had prompted him to seek refuge in the United States.
Qahtani was uncharacteristically amiable on the call. He told Khashoggi that public comments praising Saudi reforms, including a decision to allow women to drive, had pleased the crown prince. He urged Khashoggi to “keep writing and boasting” about Mohammed’s achievements. While the conversation was cordial, the subtext was clear: Khashoggi no longer lived under Saudi rule, but the country’s most powerful royal was monitoring his every word.
Khashoggi reacted with a combination of the nerve and trepidation that would define the remaining months of his life. He challenged Qahtani about the plight of activists he knew had been imprisoned in the kingdom, according to a friend who witnessed the exchange. But even as he did so, the friend said, “I saw how Jamal’s hand was shaking while holding the phone.”
A year later, Khashoggi, 59, would be dead, and Mohammed and Qahtani would be implicated by U.S. intelligence agencies in his killing, which was carried out by a team of assassins dispatched from Riyadh.
The crime has roiled relations between the United States and Saudi Arabia, exposed the ruthless side of a crown prince who was supposed to represent the kingdom’s enlightened future, and revealed the extent to which the Trump administration prioritizes protecting an oil-rich ally over humanitarian concerns.
The case has also taken on the dimensions of a global cause. Khashoggi, a contributing columnist for The Washington Post, was a writer of modest influence beyond the Middle East when he was alive. In death, he has become a symbol of a broader struggle for human rights, as well as a chilling example of the savagery with which autocratic regimes silence voices of dissent.
Khashoggi’s life and work, particularly in his final year, were inevitably more complicated than can be captured in that idealized frame. The complete truth about his fate remains elusive in large measure because of a determined Saudi effort to obscure events — an effort that included relaying false information to executives at The Post in the days after Khashoggi’s death.
This account of his final 18 months, which reveals new details about Khashoggi’s interactions with Saudi officials, his activities over the last year of his life as an exile and his killing, is based on interviews with dozens of associates, friends and officials from countries including Saudi Arabia and the United States as well as Turkey, where Khashoggi was killed and dismembered inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2.
Underestimating the Saudis
Khashoggi was an advocate for reform in his country, but he neither saw himself as a dissident nor believed in bringing radical change to a nation that has operated for the past eight decades as an absolute monarchy.
He relished his newfound freedoms in the United States and the attention his writing got from a Western audience, but he often resisted appeals from associates to be more forceful in his criticism of the kingdom. He was by many accounts depressed by the separation from his country and the strain that his departure and work placed on his family.
Even in exile, Khashoggi remained loyal to Saudi Arabia and reluctant to sever ties to the royal court. In September 2017, at the same time he was embarking on a new role as opinion columnist for The Washington Post, he was pursuing up to $2 million in funding from the Saudi government for a think tank that he proposed to run in Washington, according to documents reviewed by the paper that appear to be part of a proposal he submitted to the Saudi ministry of information.
Khashoggi also sent messages to the Saudi ambassador to the United States, Khaled bin Salman — the brother of the crown prince — expressing his loyalty to the kingdom and reporting on some of his activities in the United States, according to copies reviewed by The Post.
In one case, Khashoggi told the ambassador that he had been contacted by a former FBI agent working on behalf of families of victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks — in which 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi. He said he would go forward with the meeting and emphasize “the innocence of my country and its leadership.”
But in the conspiracy-driven climate of Middle East politics, Khashoggi came under mounting suspicion because of his writing as well as associations he cultivated over many years with perceived enemies of Riyadh.
Among Khashoggi’s friends in the United States were individuals with real or imagined affiliations with the Islamist group the Muslim Brotherhood, and an Islamic advocacy organization, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, regarded warily for its support of the public uprisings of the Arab Spring. Khashoggi cultivated ties with senior officials in the Turkish government, also viewed with deep distrust by the rulers in Saudi Arabia.
After leaving the kingdom, Khashoggi sought to secure funding and support for an assortment of ideas that probably would have riled Middle East monarchs, including plans to create an organization that would publicly rank Arab nations each year by how they performed against basic metrics of freedom and democracy.
Perhaps most problematic for Khashoggi were his connections to an organization funded by Saudi Arabia’s regional nemesis, Qatar. Text messages between Khashoggi and an executive at Qatar Foundation International show that the executive, Maggie Mitchell Salem, at times shaped the columns he submitted to The Washington Post, proposing topics, drafting material and prodding him to take a harder line against the Saudi government. Khashoggi also appears to have relied on a researcher and translator affiliated with the organization, which promotes Arabic-language education in the United States.
Editors at The Post’s opinion section, which is separate from the newsroom, said they were unaware of these arrangements, or his effort to secure Saudi funding for a think tank. “The proof of Jamal’s independence is in his journalism,” Fred Hiatt, editorial page editor of The Post, said in a statement. “Jamal had every opportunity to curry favor and to make life more comfortable for himself, but he chose exile and — as anyone reading his work can see — could not be tempted or corrupted.”
A former U.S. diplomat who had known Khashoggi since 2002, Salem said that any assistance she provided Khashoggi was from a friend who sought to help him succeed in the United States. She noted that Khashoggi’s English abilities were limited and said that the foundation did not pay Khashoggi nor seek to influence him on behalf of Qatar.
“He and I talked about issues of the day as people who had come together, caring about the same part of the world,” Salem said. “Jamal was never an employee, never a consultant, never anything to [the foundation]. Never.”
It is not clear that the Saudi government knew of Khashoggi’s ties to the Qatar foundation, although the kingdom routinely engages in surveillance of dissidents abroad.
To friends and family members, Khashoggi’s connections were indicative of his intellectual curiosity and disregard for rigid national, religious and ideological boundaries. He traveled constantly, attended dozens of conferences each year and developed long-standing friendships with people whose opinions were at odds with his own.
Nevertheless, Khashoggi knew that his writings and associations carried risks. He told friends and colleagues repeatedly that he would be imprisoned if he ever reentered Saudi Arabia, and he spoke often of his concern for his four children, including a son who remained in the kingdom and had faced intermittent harassment from the authorities there.
In the end, Khashoggi underestimated what Saudi Arabia was capable of as he entered the consulate in Istanbul to collect paperwork needed to remarry and begin rebuilding a personal life that had experienced some turmoil during his exile.
“His biggest fear was being imprisoned but not being killed,” said the friend who witnessed the Qahtani call, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for his own security. “He had never thought of that.”
'Lord of the Flies'
The October 2017 phone call was part of a long series of interactions between the Saudi columnist and Qahtani, a 40-year-old veteran of the Saudi Air Force who emerged from a decade of maneuvering in the royal court as one of the crown prince’s closest advisers.
Qahtani was given broad authority to protect the image of the crown prince, widely known by his initials, “MBS.” It was an assignment that involved flooding social media platforms with propaganda and using espionage capabilities to monitor critics. At times it also meant banning those perceived as being disloyal — including Khashoggi — from writing or posting comments online. Under Mohammed and Qahtani, many activists have also been imprisoned for their dissent.
With more than a million followers on Twitter, Qahtani is derisively known as “Lord of the Flies,” a reference to the swarms of social media operatives — “electronic flies” — that descend on perceived adversaries of the kingdom and Mohammed.
Even before Mohammed began making his move to claim the title of crown prince, Qahtani was scouring the private sector for tools that could aide him in his efforts of suppression. Emails released by WikiLeaks show that someone using Qahtani’s identity pursued spyware capabilities from an Italian company as early as 2012.
A lawsuit filed last month by a Saudi exile in Canada, Omar Abdulaziz, accused the Saudi government of monitoring his text message exchanges with Khashoggi by using Israeli software designed to secretly control an ordinary smartphone, turning it into a surveillance device against its owner.
Qahtani was working to mute Khashoggi’s voice as early as 2016.
The journalist, a native of Medina, had an eventful but often bumpy career over several decades in Saudi Arabia. Drawn to radical causes in his early years, Khashoggi traveled to Afghanistan in the 1980s as a correspondent where he interviewed Osama bin Laden and posed for a picture holding a military rifle.
Khashoggi was fired twice as editor of Saudi Arabia’s Al-Watan newspaper because he was seen as agitating against the government. But he was also an insider in the royal court. In between those editing stints, Khashoggi worked as an adviser to Prince Turki al-Faisal, the former head of Saudi intelligence, when the prince served as ambassador to the United Kingdom and then the United States.
The first major clash between Qahtani and Khashoggi came in late 2016, when the writer was working as a columnist for the London-based Al-Hayat newspaper. At a time when Mohammed and others were celebrating the election of Donald Trump, who promised a far warmer relationship with Riyadh than President Barack Obama had pursued, Khashoggi was more cautious, warning in mid-November 2016 on Twitter that the Saudis should be wary of the untested American president.
Shortly thereafter, while Khashoggi was attending a conference in Qatar, Qahtani called to inform him that he was “not allowed to tweet, not allowed to write, not allowed to talk,” said a Khashoggi associate who, like others, also spoke on the condition of anonymity for security reasons.
Qahtani added, “You can’t do anything anymore — you’re done.”
Khashoggi’s ban over the ensuing eight months coincided with a period of intense intrigue in Riyadh. As Mohammed maneuvered to consolidate power, his enforcer began building his capabilities, including “tiger teams” tasked with carrying out overseas abductions and the interrogation of prisoners. It was hard to reconcile such operations with the innocuous name of Qahtani’s department: the Center for Studies and Media Affairs.
The power grab
In April 2017, Khashoggi left Saudi Arabia for three weeks to stay in London with a Saudi businessman and fellow former adviser to Prince Turki, Nawaf Obaid, who had had his own falling out with the royal court. The two talked about Khashoggi’s desire to move to the United States, according to a person familiar with their discussions.
But Qahtani surfaced again, calling Khashoggi in London to tell him that all would be forgiven if he returned to Riyadh. It was part of Qahtani’s “hot-cold” handling of Khashoggi, the person said, alternating between being menacing and reassuring.
In June 2017, Mohammed and his supporters carried out an extraordinary power grab, detaining the designated crown prince Mohammed bin Nayef, a 57-year-old grandson of the founding Saudi monarch. He emerged from his detainment to issue a humiliating public pledge of loyalty to his much younger cousin, Mohammed, relinquishing the title of crown prince.
The turbulence added to Khashoggi’s fears. In June, as Mohammed was plotting, Khashoggi made his exit, packing his bags, locking up his house and boarding a flight to Washington.
His departure triggered a further attempt to secure his obedience. This time it came not from Qahtani but the Saudi information minister, who called Khashoggi in August to tell him that the writing ban had been lifted and that the government might be prepared to give him money to set up a pro-Saudi think tank in Washington.
The minister, Awwad Alawwad, the former Saudi ambassador to Germany, also relayed a potentially unsettling request. “The crown prince would like to see you,” the minister said, according to a Khashoggi colleague who overheard the call. Saudi officials deny that the minister mentioned Mohammed.
Always conflicted about his relationship with the royals, Khashoggi explored the think tank offer, and even submitted a proposal, according to documents reviewed by The Post. His plan described an entity that would be called the “Saudi Research Council” in Washington, with an initial budget of $1 million to $2 million.
The proposal outlined ideas such as cultivating relationships with other influential organizations, but it seemed aimed at shoring up the Saudi reputation abroad. It notes, for example, that “an irresponsible media” had unfairly maligned the kingdom over alleged connections to terrorist groups for many years, and that the council could work on behalf of Riyadh “to regain its positive role and image.”
The proposal also outlined a plan to form a team for the purpose of “monitoring potential negative news.” The team would follow emerging story lines and social media “that might explode against the kingdom” then “notify the ministry in Riyadh.”
The prospect of such a Saudi-friendly endeavor appealed to members of Khashoggi’s family who at times faced travel restrictions and other hardships imposed by Riyadh in apparent retaliation for his work. Khashoggi’s eldest son, Salah, a banker in Saudi Arabia, and other family members urged him to pursue the think tank plan.
But Khashoggi was also being prodded by others to reject Riyadh’s entreaties, and it’s not clear that the ministry of information was ever prepared to proceed.
Khashoggi appears to have reached a fateful decision in this period to turn further away from the only country he ever considered home. His marriage subsequently disintegrated and his eldest son cut off contact with him for months, friends and associates said.
Khashoggi’s children declined to be interviewed for this article.
In conversations, Khashoggi seemed alternately despondent and invigorated, proclaiming to one friend: “I am a free man, and I am going to change Saudi Arabia.”
Raising his voice
Khashoggi’s arrival in Washington came at an auspicious time for The Post, which was seeking writers for an online section called Global Opinions. One of its editors, Karen Attiah, reached out to Khashoggi to ask him to write on the forces roiling Saudi Arabia.
On Sept. 18, 2017, Khashoggi’s first column for The Post appeared with a stark opening line: “When I speak of the fear, intimidation, arrests and public shaming of intellectuals and religious leaders who dare to speak their minds, and then I tell you that I’m from Saudi Arabia, are you surprised?”
The column was also a declaration of his own independence. “I have left my home, my family and my job, and I am raising my voice,” he wrote. “I want you to know that Saudi Arabia has not always been as it is now. We Saudis deserve better.”
To hear such unflinching words from a Saudi writer was rare. The fact that they appeared on such a prominent platform would likely have been unnerving to those around the crown prince.
Mohammed had largely succeeded in Washington at casting himself as a leader who would bring Western-style reforms to Saudi Arabia. He had cultivated such a close relationship with the Trump administration that he routinely traded messages and phone calls with Trump’s son-in-law and adviser, Jared Kushner, outside traditional diplomatic channels.
Khashoggi was now writing for a publication that could undercut the crown prince’s narrative in Washington. It was less than two weeks later that Khashoggi got the call that made his hands tremble.
Khashoggi did at times praise the crown prince, crediting him for reforms, including allowing movie theaters to open in the kingdom. But he also seemed to grow more bold in his criticisms.
In November, Khashoggi compared Mohammed to Russian President Vladimir Putin just as a brutal new crackdown began in the Saudi capital. Hundreds of wealthy Saudis, including members of the royal family, were detained at the Ritz-Carlton hotel, many of them reportedly beaten while being interrogated, accused of corruption and forced to surrender billions of dollars in assets. Khashoggi criticized Saudi Arabia’s policies in Lebanon, its bombing campaign in Yemen, its blockade of Qatar, its repression of women and its opposition to a free press.
Khashoggi was never a staff employee of the Post, and he was paid about $500 per piece for the 20 columns he wrote over the course of the year. He lived in an apartment near Tysons Corner in Fairfax County that he had purchased while working at the Saudi Embassy a decade earlier.
As the months went on, he struggled with bouts of loneliness and stumbled into new relationships. He secretly married an Egyptian woman, Hanan El Atr, in a ceremony in suburban Virginia, though neither filled out paperwork to make it legal, and the relationship quickly fizzled.
Khashoggi pursued other ventures. Among them was a plan to create an organization called Democracy for the Arab World Now. He sought out financial backers and turned for organizational help to Nihad Awad, the head of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. The organization has worked to ensure the fair treatment of Muslims in the United States, but its support for the uprisings of the Arab Spring led Saudi authorities to see it as an adversary.
Khashoggi cultivated friendships with people with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization that he joined when he was a college student in the United States but subsequently backed away from. The organization is banned by autocratic regimes in the Middle East.
Khashoggi also appears to have accepted significant help with his columns. Salem, the executive at the Qatar foundation, reviewed his work in advance and in some instances appears to have proposed language, according to a voluminous collection of messages obtained by The Post.
In early August, Salem prodded Khashoggi to write about Saudi Arabia’s alliances “from DC to Jerusalem to rising right wing parties across Europe...bringing an end to the liberal world order that challenges their abuses at home.”
Khashoggi expressed misgivings about such a strident tone, then asked, “So do you have time to write it?”
“I’ll try,” she replied, although she went on to urge him to “try a draft” himself incorporating sentences that she had sent him by text. A column reflecting their discussion appeared in The Post on Aug. 7. Khashoggi appears to have used some of Salem’s suggestions, though it largely tracks ideas that he expressed in their exchange over the encrypted app WhatsApp.
Other texts in the 200-page trove indicate that Salem’s organization paid a researcher who did work for Khashoggi. The foundation is an offshoot of a larger Qatar-based organization. Khashoggi also relied on a translator who worked at times for the Qatari embassy and the foundation.
Hiatt, The Post’s editorial page editor, said that Khashoggi’s writings show no attempt to favor the Qatar position. “He doesn’t attack Saudi Arabia’s campaign against Qatar, as Qatar might have wanted,” Hiatt said. “Nor does he embrace MBS’s reforms, as the crown prince might have wanted. On the contrary: he courageously stands up for Saudi dissidents — and for the cause of freedom throughout the region — while trying to nudge the reforms in a constructive direction.”
Khashoggi and Salem seemed to understand how his association with a Qatar-funded entity could be perceived, reminding one another to keep the arrangement “discreet.” He voiced concern that his family could be vulnerable.
As she reviewed a draft of the Aug. 7 column, she accused him of pulling punches. “You moved off topic and seem to excuse Riyadh...ITS HIGHLY PROBLEMATIC.” The next day he wrote back that he had submitted the column, saying, “They’re going to hang me when it comes out.”
A syringe
By July 2018, the Saudi crown prince had commanded subordinates to find a way to bring the exiled columnist back to the kingdom, according to intercepted communications examined by U.S. intelligence officials.
They saw an opportunity in late September, when Khashoggi entered the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul seeking paperwork he needed for a marriage to a Turkish woman. He was told to return the following week. Khashoggi said he would be back the following Tuesday.
After attending a weekend conference in London, Khashoggi returned to Istanbul early in the morning on Oct. 2 and called the consulate to say he would be there by 1 p.m. He met his fiancee, Hatice Cengiz, for breakfast and told her of his plan. Concerned about him going alone, she skipped obligations at a university in Istanbul to accompany him. As he left his phones with her and went inside, it was the last time she ever saw him.
Several Saudi teams were already in place, having arrived on a pair of jets from Riyadh. The operatives had met with Qahtani before leaving, according to Saudi officials. Assigned to the team was Maher Mutreb, a Mohammed bodyguard who had worked at the Saudi Embassy in London at the same time as Khashoggi.
What happened inside might never have emerged were it not for listening devices planted in the Saudi Consulate by Turkish intelligence. The recordings span several days and capture operatives discussing in advance of Khashoggi’s arrival their plans to subdue and kill him, according to Western intelligence officials.
Khashoggi seemed to realize quickly that he was in danger. A member of the team asked whether he would take tea, and Khashoggi replied yes with an edge in his voice that made it clear that he sensed that this ritual act of politeness presaged something sinister, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified material.
A member of the team informed Khashoggi that he was going back to Saudi Arabia, according to a Western official who said that for a moment Khashoggi seems to have believed that he was going to be drugged and abducted. The Saudi team, however, brought a syringe packed with enough sedative to be lethal, the officials said.
The rest of the recording suggests there was no intent to take Khashoggi alive, multiple officials said. It captures the writer gasping for air in a physical struggle that gives way to silence. The horror resumes with the sound of an electric motor, presumably a saw that a special member of the team — a crime scene expert from the Saudi Ministry of Interior — used to dismember Khashoggi’s body.
Saudi officials maintain that the team did not bring a saw but used implements found at the consulate, citing the statements that the suspects have given authorities.
Khashoggi’s body has not been recovered. Saudi officials said that the killers entrusted Khashoggi’s remains to an accomplice in Turkey. Turkish authorities said the Saudis have yet to provide any evidence or identify this supposed individual.
Publisher, diplomat meet
Khashoggi’s disappearance, reported to Turkish authorities by Cengiz after she had waited outside the consulate for more than three hours, set off a frantic search for clues in Istanbul and Washington.
At The Post, publisher Fred Ryan appealed for help from senior Trump administration officials at the White House and State Department. Ryan also drafted a letter to Mohammed, delivered via diplomatic channels, the day after Khashoggi disappeared.
Trump officials were responsive during the initial days after the writer’s disappearance. Then, suddenly, the administration’s willingness to engage seemed to evaporate. It was as if Mohammed’s ardent backers understood, perhaps from early intelligence reports, that Khashoggi would not be found alive and that what they faced was no longer a case of a missing journalist but a looming diplomatic crisis.
Ryan’s attempts to get information from the Saudi government were met with denials and falsehoods.
After days of requests, Khaled, the Saudi ambassador and brother of the crown prince, agreed to meet with Ryan at The Post publisher’s Georgetown home. He arrived around 9 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 7, five days after Khashoggi disappeared.
The ambassador indicated that he had been gathering information from Riyadh and that Saudi Arabia did not regard Khashoggi as a threat. “Jamal has always been honest,” he said. “We have never perceived him as being an asset of [a hostile country] or anyone else.”
The ambassador proceed to make a series of assertions that defied logic and were contradicted by details emerging from Istanbul.
Ryan asked about reports that Saudi planes had flown into and out of Istanbul around the time of Khashoggi’s disappearance, pressing the ambassador on the presence of any Saudi aircraft. The ambassador responded categorically, saying that such reports were “baseless” when, in fact, such flights had taken place and the teams had flown back to Saudi Arabia within hours of Khashoggi’s death.
Asked to provide evidence backing up Saudi Arabia’s claims that Khashoggi had departed the consulate safely, the ambassador said that video cameras at the compound “weren’t recording” because of technical problems.
Ryan was incredulous. “You can walk around the block here and you will appear on a dozen video cameras,” he said motioning to the surrounding neighborhood. “I don’t understand this.” Saudi authorities have since concluded that the consulate cameras were intentionally disabled.
Ryan questioned the ambassador about other Saudi claims that seemed riddled with gaping holes of logic. Why would Khashoggi have exited through the consulate back door, as some had suggested, when his fiancee was waiting out front? Why would he deviate from what he had done just days earlier, when he entered and left through the same door?
The ambassador was adamant. Allegations of Saudi involvement were “baseless and ridiculous,” he said, noting that Saudi investigators had already arrived in Istanbul and questioned employees at the consulate. “It’s impossible that this would be covered up and we wouldn’t know about it,” he said.
In a statement Friday, Saud Kabli, the director of communications at the Saudi Embassy, said: “Nothing the Ambassador shared with Mr. Ryan in their conversation was an attempt to mislead. The information provided was the best information we had at that time. Unfortunately, that information has since proved to be false.”
The conversation concluded after an hour. Ryan ended by saying that if Khashoggi were killed or abducted by Saudi Arabia it would be “the most depraved and oppressive act against a journalist in modern history.”
Recalling the meeting in an interview, Ryan said that “overwhelming evidence has emerged indicating that virtually everything they told us was false.”
Saudi Arabia has detained 21 people in connection with Khashoggi’s killing, and removed five senior officials — including Qahtani — from their jobs. Saudi officials have continued to deny that the crown prince was involved. Though the CIA has concluded with medium to high confidence that Mohammed ordered the operation, President Trump has sought to insulate the crown prince, saying “maybe he did, maybe he didn’t.”
Turkish intelligence officials have identified Qahtani as the mastermind and indicated that he was the recipient of a message from a member of the kill team during the operation informing him that the “deed” had been done.
Saudi officials suggested that Qahtani created the crisis by driving Khashoggi from the kingdom, only to see him gain a more prominent platform for his criticism abroad. Qahtani then hatched the plot to silence Khashoggi in an effort to avoid the wrath of the crown prince, a theory that has the virtue from the Saudi perspective of shielding the royal heir from blame.
U.S. intelligence agencies tracked a flurry of messages between Mohammed and Qahtani in the hours before and after Khashoggi was killed. The Post was shown purported copies of those messages, texts that centered on mundane matters including a solar energy program and discussion of remarks by a foreign official. It was not possible to establish the authenticity of the documents.
Associates of Khashoggi draw little distinction between the crown prince and his enforcer. “Qahtani has been the source of all evil” for Khashoggi, said a friend of the journalist. “A thug. A liar. A bastard.” But each time Qahtani targeted Khashoggi, the associate said, “it’s understood who is telling him to do it.”
On Oct. 3, one day after Khashoggi’s death, while his fate remained uncertain, his researcher contacted The Post to say that he had a draft of a column that Khashoggi had begun writing before his disappearance. It was published two weeks later.
In it, Khashoggi lamented that “Arab governments have been given free rein to continue silencing the media at an increasing rate,” and that the region was “facing its own version of an Iron Curtain, imposed not by external actors but through domestic forces vying for power.”
“We need to provide a platform for Arab voices,” he said.
Correction: Nihad Awad is head of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, not the Center on American-Islamic Relations. This story has been updated.
souad.mekhennet@washpost.com
greg.miller@washpost.com


Slain journalist’s sons forgive his killers, clearing way for clemency

Salah Khashoggi, left, a son of Jamal Khashoggi, shakes hands with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on Oct. 23, 2018. (Saudi Press Agency/AP) Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi attends a news conference in the Bahraini capital, Manama, on Dec. 15, 2014. (Mohammed al-Shaikh/AFP/Getty Images) Read more Today’s coverage from Post correspondents around the world Like Washington Post World on Facebook and stay updated on foreign news

Salah Khashoggi, left, a son of Jamal Khashoggi, shakes hands with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on Oct. 23, 2018. (Saudi Press Agency/AP)

The sons of slain journalist Jamal Khashoggi posted a message on social media early Friday saying that they have forgiven their father’s killers, a declaration that could allow Saudi authorities to commute the death sentences of five Saudi officials convicted of Khashoggi’s murder.
The statement was posted on the Twitter account of Salah Khashoggi, the journalist’s eldest son, who lives in Saudi Arabia. “We, sons of the martyr Jamal Khashoggi, announce that we forgive those who killed our father,” said the message, which cited a tradition of granting pardons during the holy month of Ramadan.
The Saudi justice system allows families of victims in some capital cases to grant clemency to convicted killers. There had been widespread speculation that Khashoggi’s children, who have refrained from criticizing the Saudi leadership, would take such a step, though it was not clear whether their expression of forgiveness was extended willingly or coerced.
Khashoggi’s fiancee, Hatice Cengiz, criticized the Khashoggi family statement on Friday. “No one has the right to pardon his killers,” she wrote on Twitter. “I and others will not stop until we get #JusticeForJamal.”
Khashoggi, a veteran journalist who contributed columns to The Washington Post, was killed in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul in October 2018 when he went to collect documents that would allow him to remarry. The killers were Saudi government agents, dispatched to Turkey on the orders of top advisers to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, according to Turkish and Saudi prosecutors.

Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi attends a news conference in the Bahraini capital, Manama, on Dec. 15, 2014. (Mohammed al-Shaikh/AFP/Getty Images)

Khashoggi’s body was dismembered as part of a blundering attempt by the agents to cover up the killing, prosecutors said. The Saudi government initially denied any knowledge of the killing and later called it a rogue operation. The crown prince denied any advance knowledge of the plot, even though the CIA concluded with “medium to high confidence” that Mohammed had ordered Khashoggi’s killing.
Saudi prosecutors said in December that five unidentified people had been sentenced to death in connection with the murder after a trial in Riyadh, the Saudi capital. Three other people were sentenced to jail terms totaling 24 years.
The verdicts were criticized by human rights groups because of the trial’s secrecy. Two senior officials who were implicated in the killing, including Saud al-Qahtani, the crown prince’s media adviser, were cleared of wrongdoing, prosecutors said.
Even as the trial was held, the Saudi royal court was preparing for a private settlement with Khashoggi’s four children and hoping to ensure they refrained from criticizing the kingdom’s leadership, according to current and former Saudi officials.
To that end, the children were given multimillion-dollar homes and monthly five-figure payments as part of a compensation package that was approved by King Salman soon after Khashoggi’s killing, officials said.
After the payments were reported by The Post last year, Salah Khashoggi, a banker, characterized them as “acts of generosity” by Saudi Arabia’s leader and said they were “not admission of guilt or scandal.” He said that “no settlement discussion has been or is discussed.”

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Saudi Arabia says five sentenced to death in killing of Jamal Khashoggi

ISTANBUL —
Five people have been sentenced to death in connection with the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul last year, Saudi Arabia's public prosecutor announced Monday, but the two most senior officials implicated in the case, including an adviser to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, were cleared of wrongdoing.
The slaying of Khashoggi in October 2018 sparked a global outcry against the kingdom and led to greater scrutiny of a crackdown on dissidents pursued by the crown prince. Khashoggi, 59, a Saudi national who contributed columns to The Washington Post from self-imposed exile in the United States, had emerged as one of Mohammed’s most prominent critics.
The verdicts came after a trial in Riyadh’s criminal court that lasted nearly a year and was shrouded in secrecy. Court sessions were closed to the public, and foreign officials who attended were told not to reveal details of the proceedings. Human rights groups warned that the lack of transparency threatened to obscure the possible involvement of senior Saudi officials — including the crown prince — in the killing.
The CIA concluded last year that Mohammed had ordered Khashoggi’s assassination, contradicting Saudi Arabia’s insistence that the crown prince had no advance knowledge of the plot.
At a news conference in Riyadh on Monday, Shalaan al-Shalaan, a spokesman for the Saudi public prosecutor, declined to identify the five people who were sentenced to death. Three other people were sentenced to jail terms totaling 24 years.
Shalaan said two senior officials — Saud al-Qahtani, a royal adviser, and Ahmed al-Assiri, a former deputy head of intelligence — were investigated and exonerated. Mohammed al-Otaibi, who served as consul general in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul when the killing occurred, was also cleared, the spokesman said.
Salah Khashoggi, the eldest of Jamal’s four children, called the verdicts “just.”
“We affirm our confidence in the Saudi judiciary on all its levels, in it being fair to us, and achieving justice,” he wrote on Twitter.
But Hatice Cengiz, Khashoggi’s fiancee, also on Twitter, said the findings were “not acceptable.”
The Post’s publisher, Fred Ryan, also criticized the outcome.
“The complete lack of transparency and the Saudi government’s refusal to cooperate with independent investigators suggests that this was merely a sham trial,” Ryan said in a statement. “Those ultimately responsible, at the highest level of the Saudi government, continue to escape responsibility for the brutal murder of Jamal Khashoggi.”
Khashoggi, who lived in Virginia, visited the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2, 2018, to obtain documents that would allow him to marry Cengiz. Turkish and Saudi investigators say Khashoggi was killed soon after he arrived at the mission, as Cengiz waited outside, by a team of agents who had flown to Istanbul from Saudi Arabia.
Shalaan said the killing resulted from a “snap decision” by the Saudi operatives. Turkish investigators have cast doubt on claims that it was spontaneous. They note that the Saudi team included an autopsy expert whose role included dismembering Khashoggi’s body. Khashoggi’s remains have not been found.
It is unclear when the trial concluded. Shalaan said attendees included Khashoggi’s two sons and their lawyers, as well as representatives of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council — the United States, Britain, China, Russia and France — and Turkey.
The death sentences await confirmation by higher courts.
After the killing, Saudi authorities said they were investigating the roles played by Qahtani and Assiri in organizing and dispatching the team of agents that confronted Khashoggi inside the consulate.
The decision to investigate the two men — loyal and trusted aides of Crown Prince Mohammed — and to fire them from their posts suggested at the time that the Saudi leadership might be prepared to implicate at least a few high-level officials, as the kingdom faced its worst public relations crisis in decades.
Qahtani, a media adviser to Mohammed, was arguably the more powerful official. A strident defender of the royal family, he directed online attacks against critics of the crown prince. His swarm of Twitter operatives would berate religious scholars, dissidents and journalists in defense of Mohammed, earning Qahtani the nickname “Lord of the Flies.”
Qahtani is also accused of overseeing the kingdom’s crackdown on dissidents and directing the torture of Loujain al-Hathloul, a prominent women’s rights activist who has been imprisoned since last year. Saudi officials have denied that the activists were tortured.
The Trump administration last year imposed sanctions on 17 Saudi citizens implicated in Khashoggi’s death. They included Qahtani, who officials said was “part of the planning and execution of the operation that led to the killing.”
Shalaan said Monday that Qahtani was “investigated by the public prosecutor and was not charged because of lack of evidence against him.”
Assiri, the former deputy head of intelligence, was initially charged after prosecutors said he was responsible for issuing the order for Khashoggi’s forcible return to Saudi Arabia. Shalaan said Monday that Assiri’s guilt “was not proved.”
President Trump has vigorously defended Saudi Arabia and the crown prince, arguing that the relationship between the kingdom and the United States is too important to be derailed by Khashoggi’s death.
A senior State Department official, speaking anonymously under rules imposed by the department, called the verdicts “an important step in holding those responsible for the terrible crime accountable.”
“We’ve encouraged Saudi Arabia to undertake a fair and transparent judicial process, and we will continue to do so,” the official said.
Later, the official called the Khashoggi killing “awful” but added: “Let’s not lose sight of the fact 1,500 people were killed in recent weeks in Iran, according to Reuters. I’m not changing the subject. But there’s a lot of atrocities around the world.”
The killing widened a rift between Saudi Arabia and the government of Turkey, which first revealed the details of the grisly slaying inside the consulate.
Saudi Arabia said the killing was a rogue operation carried out by overzealous agents who had been instructed to return Khashoggi to Saudi Arabia alive.
Turkish officials remained skeptical Monday.
“The ruling of the relevant court in Saudi Arabia announced today on the murder of Mr. Jamal Khashoggi falls short of the expectations of Turkey and the international community for the clarification of all aspects of this murder and the serving of justice,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Hami Aksoy said in a statement, according to the state-run Anadolu news agency.
A U.N. human rights investigator in June called for a U.N.-assisted criminal inquiry. Agnès Callamard, a special rapporteur with the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, said that Saudi authorities participated in the destruction of evidence and that culpability for the killing extended beyond the Saudis who were charged.
Callamard called the verdicts announced Monday a “mockery.”
“The hit-men are guilty, sentenced to death,” she wrote on Twitter. “The masterminds not only walk free. They have barely been touched by the investigation and the trial. That is the antithesis of Justice.”
Adam Coogle, a Middle East researcher for New York-based Human Rights Watch, said Saudi Arabia’s “absolution of its senior leadership of any culpability in the murder of Jamal Khashoggi raises serious concerns over the fairness of the criminal proceedings.”
The kingdom’s handling of the killing, “from complete denial to hanging the murder on lower-level operatives in a trial that lacked transparency, demonstrates the need for an independent criminal inquiry,” he wrote in a text message.
kareem.fahim@washpost.com
sarah.dadouch@washpost.com


Sons of slain journalist Jamal Khashoggi appeal for the return of his remains

ISTANBUL —
More than a month after their father’s death, the sons of slain journalist Jamal Khashoggi have made a plaintive appeal for the return of his body, saying he should be buried in the Saudi city where he was born in a cemetery alongside his relatives.
“We just need to make sure that he rests in peace,” Salah Khashoggi, 35, told CNN in an interview Sunday alongside his brother, Abdullah Khashoggi, 33, in their first comments to the news media since their father was killed in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2.
Jamal Khashoggi’s body has not been found. And even as the sons requested the speedy retrieval of his remains, new details from Turkey’s investigation into the case that were released Monday made that likelihood seem remote. A Turkish official said investigators believe Saudi Arabia sent a two-person “cleanup” team to Turkey nine days after Khashoggi’s death to remove any evidence of his killing from the consulate as well as the nearby residence of the Saudi consul general.
The regional rivalry between Turkey and Saudi Arabia has captured the spotlight in the weeks since the killing of Khashoggi, a contributing columnist to The Washington Post. The government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has tried to prod Saudi leaders to acknowledge what he says is their role in the death. The Saudi government refused to comment for weeks but, in the face of international outrage, finally conceded that Khashoggi was killed in their consulate, even as they blamed it on rogue Saudi agents.
Lost in the din have been the voices of Khashoggi’s children, grieving and forced to pick through a confusion of graphic news reports as they piece together details of their father’s death. Khashoggi’s daughters did not appear in the CNN interview.
“Everybody’s telling a different story. I’m trying to simplify it as much as possible. He died,” Abdullah Khashoggi said. “It’s not a normal situation and not a normal death.”
“I really hope that whatever happened wasn’t painful for him, or it was quick,” he added.
Salah Khashoggi, who lives in Saudi Arabia, became the public face of the family’s sorrow when a photograph of him, stone-faced, meeting Saudi King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was shared on social media and interpreted as evidence of the family’s rage at the royal family.
But in fact, Salah Khashoggi said, the king had assured him that “everybody involved will be brought to justice” for the killing.
“I have faith in that. This will happen,” he said.
Erdogan has said that Jamal Khashoggi’s killing by Saudi agents was premeditated and that the order came from the “highest levels” of the Saudi government, although he has not specified who he thinks was responsible. Erdogan also has demanded that the Saudi government reveal the location of Khashoggi’s body.
Turkey has said that a hit squad sent from Saudi Arabia strangled Khashoggi shortly after he entered the consulate to seek a document he needed for his planned marriage to his Turkish fiancee. Turkish authorities said the team dismembered Khashoggi’s body and disposed of it.
Turkey has repeatedly accused Saudi authorities of trying to obstruct its investigation. On Monday, a Turkish official said that at least two members of a team that Saudi Arabia sent to investigate Khashoggi’s killing were actually there to cover it up.
The official, who was not authorized to comment on the record and spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the dispatch of the two men to Turkey “suggests that Khashoggi’s slaying was within the knowledge of top Saudi officials.”
The official confirmed details in a report published Monday in Turkey’s pro-government Sabah newspaper that said the two men — a chemist and a toxicologist — were part of a delegation of Saudi investigators sent to Turkey nine days after Khashoggi was killed.
Beginning Oct. 12, the two men visited the consulate regularly for a week, the paper reported.
“We believe that the two individuals came to Turkey for the sole purpose of covering up evidence,” the official said.
kareem.fahim@washpost.com


Saudi Arabia hands down ‘final’ rulings in Jamal Khashoggi murder, sentencing 8 to prison terms

Saudi Arabia’s public prosecutor said Monday that eight people had been sentenced to prison terms between seven and 20 years for the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, in what the prosecutors said was a “final” ruling in the case, according to a statement carried by the Saudi state-run news agency.
The statement did not name the defendants. They were all believed to be members of a 15-man hit squad that traveled to Turkey from Saudi Arabia in October 2018 before killing and dismembering Khashoggi, a critic of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul.
The rulings came after a trial that was closed to the public and the news media and that was criticized by human rights groups as lacking transparency.
“These verdicts carry no legal or moral legitimacy. They came at the end of a process which was neither fair, nor just, or transparent,” Agnès Callamard, a U.N. human rights expert who conducted an investigation into the killing, wrote on Twitter after the sentences were announced.
Saudi Arabia’s leaders have been desperate to move past the killing. Grisly details had fueled global outrage, as did Saudi Arabia’s initial denials that it had anything to do with Khashoggi’s disappearance.
And the Saudi ruling on Monday failed to answer the most urgent questions about the murder, including who had ordered it and the whereabouts of Khashoggi’s remains.
The CIA concluded with “medium to high confidence” that Mohammed, who effectively rules Saudi Arabia, had ordered the killing, which he has denied. Turkey is holding a separate trial and has indicted 20 Saudi citizens on murder charges, though none of the defendants is in Turkish custody.
Khashoggi, 59, was a veteran Saudi journalist who contributed opinion columns to The Washington Post. He had visited the Istanbul consulate intending to collect documents that would allow him to remarry while his fiancee, Hatice Cengiz, waited for him outside.
In a statement posted on Twitter, Cengiz said: “The Saudi authorities are closing the case without the world knowing the truth of who is responsible for Jamal’s murder. Who planned it, who ordered it, where is his body?”
Five of the eight defendants were spared the death penalty after Khashoggi’s sons announced in May they had forgiven their father’s killers.  The Saudi justice system allows families of victims in some capital cases to grant clemency to convicted killers. Instead, the five received 20-year prison terms, according to the statement on Monday.
Three other defendants received sentences between seven and 10 years, the statement said.
Two senior Saudi officials — Saud al-Qahtani, a powerful royal media adviser, and Ahmed al-Assiri, a former deputy head of intelligence — were exonerated by the Saudi court late last year, even after Saudi prosecutors said the two men played central roles in the plot that led to Khashoggi’s death.


Saudi Arabia distances crown prince from killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi

ISTANBUL —
Saudi Arabia’s public prosecutor released the findings of a long-awaited investigation of the death of journalist Jamal Khashoggi on Thursday, saying that a team of Saudi agents dispatched to Istanbul with orders to bring him home alive had instead killed the journalist and dismembered his body.
Saudi Arabia’s crown prince had no knowledge of the operation, Shaalan al-Shaalan, a spokesman for the prosecutor, said at a news conference in Riyadh, the Saudi capital.
He said that 11 suspects have been indicted and that authorities are seeking the death penalty for five of them. None of the suspects were named. The order to kill Khashoggi, who had criticized the Saudi monarchy over the past year, came from one of the leaders of the Saudi team in Istanbul, Shaalan said.
Prosecutor Saud al-Mojeb’s conclusion — that the killing was authorized by relatively low-level officials who disobeyed orders and acted on the fly — contradicted assertions by Turkish investigators, who have said it was a meticulously planned operation, with elaborate preparations to cover up the crime that included scouting locations where Khashoggi’s body could be disposed of in secret.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the slaying was premeditated and the orders came from “the highest levels of the Saudi government,” without specifying exactly who was responsible.
Turkey has called for an international investigation into the killing. On Thursday, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said that some of the latest Saudi statements about the killing were not “satisfactory.”
“This is not something that happens instantaneously,” he said. “People and tools were brought to dismember the body.”
Khashoggi, a contributing columnist to The Washington Post, was killed Oct. 2, soon after entering the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul to obtain documents he needed to remarry.
The U.S. Treasury said Thursday that it would impose sanctions on 17 individuals linked to the “abhorrent killing.” On the list was Saud al-Qahtani, a close adviser to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and the consul general of the Istanbul mission, Mohammad al-Otaibi.
“These individuals who targeted and brutally killed a journalist who resided and worked in the United States must face consequences for their actions,” the Treasury said in a statement.
Officials in several countries have said it is unlikely that Khashoggi was killed without the knowledge of the crown prince, Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader. But there is no definitive evidence that Mohammed ordered the operation. Saudi officials deny that the crown prince was in any way responsible for Khashoggi’s death.
“He did not have any knowledge,” Shaalan said Thursday.
Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir described the killing as a “mistake” and denied any involvement on the part of Mohammed. “His royal highness the crown prince has nothing to do with this issue,” Jubeir he told reporters in Riyadh.
Mojeb’s statement Thursday implicated two higher-level officials in what the prosecutor said was an operation intended either to persuade or force Khashoggi to return to Saudi Arabia. One of them, Ahmed al-Assiri, a former deputy head of intelligence, issued an order for Khashoggi’s return on Sept. 29, the prosecutor said. That was one day after Khashoggi first visited the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul and was told to return the following week.
Qahtani, on the U.S. sanctions list Thursday, was also involved in planning Khashoggi’s repatriation, according to the prosecutor.
Saudi officials have changed their story about Khashoggi’s killing several times since he disappeared, first denying any knowledge of his whereabouts and then saying that he was killed during a fistfight.
In the latest version laid out by the prosecutor, a 15-member team was formed to bring Khashoggi back from Istanbul, “by means of persuasion, and if persuasion fails, to do so by force.” The team included a forensic expert “for the purpose of removing evidence from the scene in case force had to be used to return the victim,” according to a summary of the prosecutor’s statement that was emailed to reporters.
The leader of the Saudi team also contacted a collaborator in Turkey to secure a safe house in case Khashoggi was forcibly removed, the statement said. But after deciding that moving Khashoggi to a safe house would not be possible, a team leader decided to kill the journalist, according to the prosecutor.
“The investigation concluded that the crime was carried out after a physical altercation with the victim where he was forcibly restrained and injected with a large amount of a drug resulting in an overdose that led to his death, may Allah bless his soul,” the statement said.
Khashoggi’s body was dismembered and then taken by one of the Saudi agents to the “local collaborator,” according to the prosecutor, who said a sketch of the collaborator has been produced.
Turkish officials have complained repeatedly about Saudi Arabia’s refusal to identify the collaborator and said they suspect that such a person does not exist. They have also demanded that the Saudis reveal the whereabouts of Khashoggi’s remains.
Turkey’s prosecutor said late last month that Khashoggi was strangled or suffocated as soon as he entered the consulate, in line with “premeditated plans.”
Khashoggi’s eldest son, Salah Khashoggi, announced Thursday on Twitter that the family would receive condolence visits beginning Friday.
kareem.fahim@washpost.com


Son of slain journalist Jamal Khashoggi appears to defend Saudi crown prince, his family’s compensation

The oldest son of slain Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi on Wednesday appeared to defend the crown prince suspected of orchestrating his father’s killing as well as the family’s decision to accept compensation worth millions of dollars from the Saudi government.
In an apparent reference to those payments, Salah Khashoggi said on Twitter that “acts of generosity and humanity come from the high moral grounds” maintained by King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and are “not admission of guilt or scandal.”
The posting represented the first statement from the family since The Washington Post reported this month that all four of Khashoggi’s adult children have been given multimillion-dollar homes in the kingdom and are receiving monthly payments exceeding $10,000 apiece.
The story also said the Khashoggi children are in line to receive additional payments possibly totaling tens of millions of dollars as part of “blood money” negotiations that are expected to ensue when trials of Khashoggi’s accused killers conclude.
Salah Khashoggi sought to cast doubt on that sequence, saying that “no settlement discussion has been or is discussed.” Others close to the matter have said it is accurate that no formal negotiations have begun, but only because it would be premature to do so before the cases are resolved.
Saudi prosecutors are seeking the death penalty against five men accused of playing a direct role in the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, a contributing columnist for The Washington Post, at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul in October. Among them is Maher Abdulaziz Mutreb, a longtime Saudi official with close ties to the crown prince who previously worked with Khashoggi at the Saudi Embassy in London.
Saudi officials have maintained that the killing was carried out by rogue Saudi operatives and that Mohammed had no foreknowledge of or involvement in the plot. But the CIA, citing intercepted communications and other evidence, has concluded with medium to high confidence that the crown prince ordered Khashoggi’s capture or death.
Salah, the only Khashoggi child who continues to live in Saudi Arabia, has been the family’s point person in dealings with the government and royal court. He was photographed shaking hands with the crown prince in October before leaving the kingdom to meet with others in his family, including a brother and two sisters.
When reached by phone earlier this month, Khashoggi declined to answer questions about the payments. His statement Wednesday appeared to acknowledge the compensation indirectly, saying that members of the family “were brought up by our parents to thank acts of good not disavow.”
Khashoggi and his siblings were given houses in Jiddah worth several million dollars apiece, according to people familiar with the arrangement. Salah Khashoggi owns the largest of the structures, while the other properties are part of a shared compound.
The children also received initial payments of about 1 million Saudi riyal — or roughly $266,000 — after Saudi authorities acknowledged that their father had been killed by state operatives, according to a person with knowledge of the issue who spoke on condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the matter. These payments have not been previously disclosed because they were not known at the time of The Post story this month.
The Khashoggi children have shown significant restraint in their few public statements since their father’s death. But Salah Khashoggi’s tweet went further than those previous communications in praising the crown prince.
The son described his father as “a respectable journalist and patriotic Saudi citizen,” although he was frequently critical of the kingdom’s policies in opinion columns published by The Post.
The paper also reported in December that Jamal Khashoggi had relied on associates, including a longtime friend with close ties to Qatar, to help shape his writings for an American audience. Part of his son’s statement seemed aimed at that account, saying that “recent attempts to smear his legacy and draw friction are ill and immoral.”
greg.miller@washpost.com


Trump says Saudis engaged in ‘worst coverup ever’ as U.S. imposes penalties

ISTANBUL —
President Trump said Tuesday that Saudi officials had engaged in the “worst coverup ever” after the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi earlier this month, as the administration took its first concrete step to penalize Saudi Arabia, revoking visas for its agents implicated in the killing.
That initial penalty was modest, since 18 of the 21 Saudi suspects were already under arrest, and Trump said he would “leave it up to Congress” to determine how best to punish the kingdom for the killing inside its Istanbul consulate.
Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, on Tuesday labeled the killing “planned” and “brutal” and called on Saudi Arabia to extradite the detained suspects to Turkey to face justice. Erdogan’s highly anticipated comments, during a speech to his ruling party in the capital, Ankara, contradicted Saudi accounts that Khashoggi was killed when an argument inside the consulate escalated into a fistfight.
The Turkish leader did not directly accuse the Saudi leadership of involvement in the killing but strongly indicated that the Saudi investigation had not reached high enough into the kingdom’s ruling circles.
“It will not satisfy the public by just pinning this kind of matter on a few security and intelligence officers,” he said. “Covering up this kind of savagery will hurt the conscience of all humanity.”
Providing several new details, Erdogan described an operation in which Saudi agents removed the hard disk on a consulate camera and one team visited wooded areas in and around Istanbul “for reconnaissance” before the killing. These were areas that Turkish police later focused on as they searched for Khashoggi’s body.
Speaking in the Oval Office, Trump skewered the Saudis, saying, “They had a very bad original concept, it was carried out poorly, and the coverup was the worst in the history of coverups.” He added, “In terms of what we ultimately do, I’m going to leave it very much — in conjunction with me — I’m going to leave it up to Congress.”
The State Department said the visa penalties would affect 21 Saudis. Most already have visas, and their documents are being revoked. Some who do not have visas are now ineligible for them, officials said.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who announced the action, said he is also working with the Treasury Department on whether to impose sanctions on those responsible for the journalist’s death.
“These penalties will not be the last word on this matter from the United States,” Pompeo said during a briefing at the State Department. “We will continue to explore additional measures to hold those responsible accountable.”
The killing of Khashoggi, a critic of the Saudi government and a contributing columnist for The Washington Post, has provoked international outrage over Saudi Arabia’s conduct and raised urgent questions about whether the kingdom’s crown prince and de facto ruler, Mohammed bin Salman, was involved in the plot.
Mohammed on Tuesday received a standing ovation when he appeared at a major investment conference in Riyadh — which some Western executives and leaders have withdrawn from because of the controversy — but the crown prince did not address the crowd.
Separately on Tuesday, the official Saudi Press Agency published photos of the Saudi monarch, King Salman, and the crown prince meeting two members of Khashoggi’s family, including his son.
One photo showed the son, Salah, looking ashen-faced and shaking hands with Mohammed as a video cameraman stood in the background. Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Ministry wrote on Twitter that the leaders shared “their deepest condolences and sympathy to the family of Jamal Khashoggi, may God rest his soul.”
For more than two weeks after Khashoggi disappeared while visiting the consulate, Saudi officials repeatedly said that he had left the mission alive and that they had no information about his whereabouts. Early Saturday, the Saudi officials did an abrupt reversal, acknowledging he had been killed inside the consulate but blaming the matter on a “rogue” operation that ended in a deadly brawl.
“Saudi Arabia took an important step by accepting the murder,” Erdogan said in his speech. “After this, we expect them to reveal those responsible for this matter. We have information that the murder is not instant, but planned,” he said.
Erdogan directly addressed King Salman, noticeably making no mention of the 33-year-old crown prince. Erdogan requested that the 18 Saudi suspects arrested so far be put on trial in Istanbul and said it was important that any Saudi investigation be carried out “by an impartial and fair delegation” with no connections to the killing.
The Turkish president did not address some of the most explosive allegations that have surfaced during the investigation — notably that Khashoggi was dismembered after he was killed. And he did not present any of the evidence that Turkey had gathered so far, including audio recordings that investigators are said to possess that captured the moments when Khashoggi was killed.
But Erdogan provided the most detailed timeline yet of the days and hours leading up to the killing three weeks ago.
In the timeline he laid out, the team of Saudi agents dispatched to Istanbul had carefully prepared for Khashoggi’s death.
The team was first alerted, Erdogan said, after Khashoggi visited the consulate on Sept. 28.
“Planning and the work of a road map starts here,” the president said. Three days later, on Oct. 1, teams of Saudi agents begin arriving in Istanbul, he said, with one team performing reconnaissance in nearby wooded areas. The Saudi team consisted of “intelligence, security and forensic workers,” Erdogan said.
Khashoggi entered the mission at 1:14 p.m. Oct. 2. When he had not emerged a few hours later, his fiancee, Hatice Cengiz, who was waiting for him outside, alerted authorities and an investigation began, Erdogan said. Camera footage showed that Khashoggi never left, he added.
Erdogan highlighted attempts by the Saudis to obstruct or cover up the killing, including a ruse involving a Saudi agent who was dressed like Khashoggi and captured on camera exiting the consulate.
“Why did 15 people gather in Istanbul the day of the murder? Who did these people receive orders from?” he asked. “Why was the consulate opened not immediately, but days later, for investigation? When the murder was obvious, why were inconsistent explanations given?”
“Why is the body still not found?”
During Erdogan’s address Tuesday, lawmakers from his party sat mostly silent. But when he shifted to his demands of the Saudi royals, the audience cheered enthusiastically at the mention of Turkey’s sovereignty and authority to prosecute the suspects.
In a phone call to Khashoggi’s family on Tuesday, Erdogan expressed his condolences for the journalist’s death and promised to continue pursuing the investigation, according to a person familiar with the conversation.
The Khashoggi case has embarrassed the Trump administration, which regards the crown prince as one of its closest Arab allies and Saudi Arabia as a cornerstone of the U.S. strategy to counter Iran. On Monday, CIA Director Gina Haspel headed to Turkey, where she is expected to assess the strength of the evidence that Turkish officials have collected.
Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir said Tuesday that the kingdom was committed to a “comprehensive investigation” into the journalist’s death and had dispatched a team to Turkey.
Speaking in Indonesia on Tuesday, Jubeir said the Saudi investigators had “uncovered evidence of a murder.” He also vowed to put mechanisms in place that would prevent similar incidents in the future, without expanding upon what those would be.
Khashoggi’s death has tarnished the global reputation of the crown prince, who has eased social restrictions at home while pursuing an unrelenting crackdown on rivals and critics, imprisoning hundreds. Mohammed has also tried to lure exiled dissidents such as Khashoggi, who lived in Virginia, back to Saudi Arabia, Khashoggi’s friends and other exiles have said.
As Saudi Arabia on Tuesday opened its landmark business conference — part of the crown prince’s plan to diversify the economy and reduce reliance on oil revenue — the country’s Foreign Ministry released video of him inside a crowd of attendees, posing for a selfie.
Despite the pullout of several high-profile participants, including U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde, the event was packed with people from across the Middle East, as well as from China, India and the United States.
Khashoggi’s death was acknowledged at the beginning of the conference by a panel moderator, Lubna Olayan, a prominent Saudi business leader who said she had known the journalist.
“I want to tell all our foreign guests, for whose presence with us this morning we are very grateful, that the terrible acts reported in recent weeks are alien to our culture and our DNA,” she said.
kareem.fahim@washpost.com
tamer.el-ghobashy@washpost.com
john.hudson@washpost.com
chico.harlan@washpost.com


Jamal Khashoggi’s disappearance in Turkey plays into Middle East media war

More than a week after the disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi, all parties involved agree that the journalist walked into Saudi Arabia’s consulate in Istanbul on the afternoon of Oct. 2.
When it comes to what happened next, however, the Saudis have a very different story.
Saudi Arabia says Khashoggi left the consulate, where he was seeking papers that would allow him to marry his Turkish fiancee, after an unremarkable visit. Yet Turkish authorities, as well as the missing Saudi journalist’s friends and family, say Khashoggi did not come out of the consulate, where his fiancee was waiting for him outside.
With little evidence officially put forward by either side, journalists from The Washington Post and other news organizations have reported on unreleased details about the investigation, some of which have been obtained from Turkish officials speaking off the record. These details suggest that Khashoggi was killed at the consulate.
There has been some corroboration from other sources, including by U.S. intelligence officials who said Saudi Arabia’s powerful crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, had been trying to lure Khashoggi back to the kingdom.
But the Middle East is deeply divided by geopolitical interests and is a place where leaks of information — and misinformation — are often intended to drive narratives. Turkey and Saudi Arabia sit on opposing sides of this divide, and both have a reputation for muddying the water.
Turkey is “really notorious for social media disinformation, trolling, outright lies in the press” to further the government’s position, said Steven Cook of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Saudi Arabia has not offered any compelling evidence or even a plausible alternative hypothesis for what happened inside the consulate; it has said that security cameras at the facility did not record footage. Instead, it has tried to undermine the reports about Khashoggi by focusing on the source of information and the idea that Turkey does not have a neutral viewpoint.
Khalid bin Salman, the Saudi ambassador to the United States and the crown prince’s brother, released a statement this week that criticized “various malicious leaks and grim rumors flying around about Jamal’s whereabouts and fate.”
Although the Saudi government is not a neutral party in the situation, some experts agreed that the Turkish accounts needed real scrutiny. “Having been on the end of Turkish state-affiliated media attacks and lies, I can see that the possibility for manipulation here is great,” said Cook, who added that he thinks Khashoggi was killed inside the consulate.
Under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey has cracked down on the country’s once-vibrant and relatively free media world. It ranks 157 in Reporters Without Borders' World Press Freedom Index, having dropped more than 50 spots in a decade. The Committee to Protect Journalists says more journalists are imprisoned in Turkey than in any other country.
Some of the information attributed to Turkish officials presents a contradictory account of what may have happened in the consulate. One report suggested that the Turkish government may have video of the alleged killing of Khashoggi, while other outlets have suggested that some officials think the journalist is still alive.
H.A. Hellyer, a senior nonresident fellow with the Atlantic Council in London, said the chaotic nature of the Turkish leaks in the immediate aftermath of Khashoggi’s disappearance may have been an attempt to pressure Saudi Arabia.
The Turkish line has since become more consistent, he said. “One can only imagine that the Turks' expectations of what Riyadh is going to do have changed,” Hellyer added.
Publications funded by the Saudi government and its allies appear to be attempting to cast doubt on the case, rather than present a rival theory. At the weekend, al-Arabiya English published an interview that it said was conducted with Salah Khashoggi, the eldest son of the missing journalist, in which he was quoted as saying that he did not know his father’s fiancee and stressed that he wanted to cooperate with the Saudi government.
Salah Khashoggi remains in Saudi Arabia, however, raising questions about whether any interview conducted with him would have been under duress.
Supporters of the Saudi viewpoint also have latched on to the fact that some of the reporting on the case has come from media outlets that are close to the Turkish government or news organizations such as Al Jazeera that are funded by the government of Qatar, a small Persian Gulf country embroiled in a standoff with Saudi Arabia and its allies.
“The Saudi-Erdogan relationship is stressed,” Ali Shihabi, founder of the Arabia Foundation, a pro-Riyadh think tank in Washington, wrote on Twitter over the weekend. He said Turkey would need to present “absolutely irrefutable evidence” for its allegations to be believed.
Turkey has remained a key ally for Qatar even as Saudi Arabia led a blockade of the tiny oil-rich state. Turkey even sent troops to Qatar in a show of strength and support last year.
The Qatar-Saudi spat has become notorious for acts of subterfuge and the leaks of information and misinformation. Qatari-linked hackers are widely suspected of leaking the personal emails of Yousef al-Otaiba, ambassador to the United States for the United Arab Emirates, a key Saudi ally. The move appeared to be a response to a hack of Qatari government websites that U.S. officials say the UAE orchestrated.
“I think we’ve got to remember, for years, there have been propaganda missives from Saudi-funded media, Turkish-funded media, Qatari-funded media — and it’s been pretty constant,” Hellyer said. “All these media operations take their cues from state apparatuses, directly or otherwise, so it makes it really difficult to rely on them independently, without double and triple verification."
Akin Unver, a professor at Kadir Has University in Istanbul who specializes in digital propaganda, said both sides in the Saudi-Qatar split had made widespread use of misinformation and propaganda, often employing government-sponsored trolls and bots on social media to escalate disputes and gain support.
But despite Saudi Arabia’s narrative on Khashoggi’s disappearance, Unver said he was surprised not to have seen similar levels of propaganda from either side about the case — even though Turkey was perhaps the most active country in this field, he said.
“This means that both countries view the matter as extremely delicate and don’t want to use propaganda as a way of political communication before the diplomatic negotiations are complete,” Unver said.
For the United States, finding out conclusively what happened to Khashoggi will prove important to its Middle East policy. The Trump administration has closely aligned itself with the Saudi crown prince and is at odds with Turkey’s Erdogan on several issues, but the U.S. Senate opened an investigation of the Khashoggi case Wednesday that could result in sanctions on Saudi officials if the Turkish version of events is confirmed.
An investigation by the United States or another outside arbitrator would be the best chance to find out conclusively what happened, Cook said. “Even if the Turks aren’t lying, you have to have another layer there,” he said, “because they’ve been so bad on this.”
Read more:
Missing journalist’s fiancee demands to know: ‘Where is Jamal?’
Crown prince sought to lure Khashoggi back to Saudi Arabia and detain him, U.S. intercepts show


Khashoggi fiancee criticizes Trump’s response to killing of Saudi journalist

The fiancee of slain Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi criticized the U.S. response to his killing on Wednesday, saying that the Trump administration has failed to uphold American values by allowing the Saudi government to avoid meaningful consequences for the crime.
Khashoggi “had always championed the U.S.” as “ the place you went “to challenge the status quo and speak truth to power,” Hatice Cengiz said in a meeting Wednesday with Washington Post journalists. “Jamal would have been most disappointed of all to see the U.S. response.”
Cengiz’s remarks are her strongest statement to date on the Trump administration’s muted reaction to a killing that was widely condemned as an attack on press freedoms and a brazen violation of human rights.
President Trump has questioned the CIA’s conclusion that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman authorized the operation and has resisted imposing any substantial penalty on a long-standing Middle East ally.
Cengiz, who is scheduled to testify before a House subcommittee Thursday, also said that the Saudi government has not contacted her to offer compensation or even condolences since Khashoggi was killed in the kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul last October. By contrast, the kingdom has given millions of dollars in cash and property to Khashoggi’s four adult children.
Cengiz was the last person to see Khashoggi before he entered the consulate to obtain papers for their planned marriage. He never emerged from the building, where according to U.S. and Turkish authorities he was killed and dismembered by a team of assassins dispatched from Riyadh.
She also described an alarming conversation with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan after Khashoggi’s death, in which the Turkish leader cautioned about the danger posed by Saudi Arabia under the volatile crown prince.
“What we are faced with now is not a normal country, not a normal leader,” Erdogan said, according to Cengiz. He added that Mohammed is “someone who tends to behave erratically.”
The White House and the Saudi Embassy in Washington did not respond to requests for comment.
Turkey and Saudi Arabia are rivals, and Erdogan’s government reacted with anger to the kingdom’s apparent belief that it could kill one of its citizens with impunity on Turkish soil.
A Turkish intelligence recording shared with the CIA included audio of a struggle inside the consulate and Khashoggi gasping for air. Turkish surveillance footage also showed Saudi operatives clumsily trying to cover their tracks in Istanbul, and it helped to disprove Saudi claims that Khashoggi had left the consulate unharmed.
Saudi officials have denied that Mohammed was involved in or even aware of the operation to kill Khashoggi, insisting that it was carried out by rogue elements of the government. Saudi authorities have announced investigations of 21 people in connection with the killing, and prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for five men accused of being directly involved.
Cengiz said she had met Khashoggi at a conference last year and that the two soon made plans to wed. She said that he sometimes voiced concerns that Saudi Arabia would retaliate for columns he wrote that were critical of the government by seizing his passport or other means but that he did not fear for his safety.
She said she accompanied him to the consulate of her own accord that day, and that while he left belongings including a phone with her outside, he did not express any concern that he might be abducted or take any precautions such as leaving her with instructions on whom to call.
Cengiz said she had considered relocating to the United States after Khashoggi’s disappearance but opted to settle in London, where she now lives and is pursuing a doctoral degree, in part because the “U.S. is going through a difficult political time.”
She said that Saudi Arabia has continued to impede the search for answers to lingering questions, including the whereabouts of Khashoggi’s remains. Based on conversations with Turkish officials, she said, “I know for a fact they have not found anything.”
As a result, she said, she still clings to a small hope that Khashoggi might be alive. “If someone came up to me and said he is alive, I would believe it,” she said.
greg.miller@washpost.com


In death, Saudi writer’s mild calls for reform grew into a defiant shout

When he began his self-imposed exile to Washington last year, Jamal Khashoggi described himself simply as one “independent journalist using his pen for the good of his country.” With his brutal killing in Turkey this month, the Saudi journalist became much more: the Arab world’s loudest dissenter and an international symbol for the cause of free expression.
In their effort to silence the 59-year-old writer, Saudi officials eliminated a domestic nuisance who had angered the country’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. In the process, however, they touched off a temblor of global outrage that would shake the kingdom and strain relations with its most important allies.
After two weeks of denials, the Saudi government acknowledged early Saturday that Mr. Khashoggi had died violently inside the country’s diplomatic consulate in Istanbul, while claiming that the death resulted from an argument and fistfight. A government statement announced the arrests of 18 Saudis, the firing of five top officials and a plan to overhaul the country’s intelligence agencies — to be overseen by Mohammed.
Yet, if anything, the admission appeared only to further amplify Mr. Khashoggi’s criticisms of the Saudi government. Senior U.S. lawmakers of both political parties expressed skepticism Saturday over the Saudi explanation for his killing, and Rep. Adam B. Schiff (Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, demanded in a Twitter post that “The Kingdom must be held to account.” Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) tweeted: “To say that I am skeptical of the new Saudi narrative about Mr. Khashoggi is an understatement. . . . It’s hard to find this latest ‘explanation’ as credible.”
Ironically, Mr. Khashoggi had never sought to be a disrupter and instead, as a lifelong member of the Saudi political establishment, had been an advocate for modest reform within the system. Refusing to be labeled a “dissident,” he argued simply that his fellow Arabs deserved the “right to speak their minds without fear of imprisonment,” as he wrote in a Washington Post column in April.
Up until his death, he firmly believed that such reforms were within reach, even in Saudi Arabia, friends and former colleagues said.
“This was Jamal: He had a never-ending hope that changes could happen, and that Arabs could lead the way,” said Maggie Mitchell Salem, a former State Department official and Middle East specialist who became a lifelong friend.
“In killing him, it’s like they killed more than a man,” she said. “They killed a vision of what Arab media and society could be like.”
Speaking out boldly
Mr. Khashoggi spent his life straddling uncomfortable boundaries between occupations and interests that often seemed in conflict.
He was a lifelong journalist who also moved easily within the highest circles of Saudi politics, and sometimes served as a spokesman and adviser to senior government officials. He was a supporter of political Islam who at times sympathized with the Muslim Brotherhood, the transnational Sunni Muslim movement that is now outlawed in Saudi Arabia. Yet he was a strident critic of Islamist extremism, and he spent his later years championing liberal causes such as women’s rights and freedom of expression in Muslim societies.
Early in his journalistic career, in the 1980s and 1990s, he became famous for his repeated interviews with Osama bin Laden, and he wrote admiringly in those days about the wealthy Saudi whose U.S.-backed mujahideen militia was fighting the communist government of Afghanistan. But he later broke sharply with bin Laden over his embrace of terrorism, and he became one of the Arab world’s most vociferous critics of al-Qaeda after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
“The most pressing issue now,” he wrote in a 2002 essay, “is to ensure that our children can never be influenced by extremist ideas, like those 15 Saudis who were misled into hijacking four planes that fine September day, piloting them, and us, straight into the jaws of hell.”
He considered himself to be a fierce Saudi patriot, friends say, though he embraced the West and was frequently critical of his country’s rulers and policies. He met freely with officials and operatives from foreign intelligence agencies, including those of the United States and other Western countries, but sought no favors and “carefully avoided compromising his journalistic integrity,” according to a former U.S. intelligence official who met frequently with him over two decades.
“He believed in working within legal parameters” to improve conditions in his country, said the official, who insisted on anonymity in describing his agency’s information-collection efforts. “He also believed that the United States could be a force for good in Saudi Arabia.”
His seemingly contradictory stances earned Mr. Khashoggi legions of opponents and critics. Some Arab dissidents distrusted him because of his close ties with senior government officials, such as Turki al-Faisal, the Saudi prince and former ambassador to Washington, for whom Mr. Khashoggi once worked as a media adviser. But over time, it was the Saudi establishment that turned on the journalist, moving first to shut down his publishing platforms in the Arab peninsula, and then to crush him.
His chief offense: speaking out boldly about the problems he saw at home, said Hisham Melhem, a columnist for the Lebanese newspaper An-Nahar and longtime acquaintance of Mr. Khashoggi.
“He was offended by the corruption he saw, and he pushed for a degree of political empowerment for Saudi citizens,” Melhem said. For Saudi Arabia’s leaders, “that put Khashoggi in the category of misfits and troublemakers.”
Shut down and fired
Born in the Saudi holy city of Medina, Mr. Khashoggi grew up without wealth in a middle-class Saudi family with Turkish ancestry. He did have numerous important familial connections to the upper echelons of Saudi society. His grandfather was a physician to the royal court. His uncle, Adnan Khashoggi, was an international arms dealer who briefly became a figure in the Iran-contra scandal of the 1980s. He was a first cousin of Dodi Fayed, the Egyptian film producer who was dating Britain’s Diana, Princess of Wales, at the time of their fatal car crash in Paris in 1997.
Khashoggi studied business administration at Indiana State University and managed bookstores in Saudi Arabia before venturing into journalism. He covered conflicts in Afghanistan, Algeria and Sudan for the Saudi Gazette and later would rise to the top ranks of Saudi newspaper writers and opinion-makers. But it was his advocacy of democratic reforms — most notably in the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings — that won him notoriety abroad and deep distrust within the inner circles of the Saudi elite.
“He was always drawing my attention,” said Yasin Aktay, an adviser to Turkey’s ruling AKP party who frequently engaged with Mr. Khashoggi during panels and conferences. “After the Arab Spring, he was very prominent in discussions, because, while his country was anti-Arab Spring, he was pro-Arab Spring, and promoting democratization movements. He thought the Arab Spring was a historical chance for the Arab world.”
Friends say Mr. Khashoggi had a complex view of the Muslim Brotherhood and other political Islamists, particularly in his later years. He believed that democracy in the Middle East was impossible unless moderate Islamists were allowed a voice, acquaintances said, but also he disdained extremism, and his social leanings were decidedly secularist.
“His idea was that we shouldn’t be an enemy to them,” said a Saudi friend who requested anonymity because of the risk of official retaliation. “It’s wasn’t his mentality. He was more liberal, more Western.”
In part because of his deep connections to Turki, the former ambassador, and to billionaire Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, Mr. Khashoggi managed to rise to increasingly prominent positions in the Arab media world, only to find his path blocked by more conservative Saudi officials who objected to his political views. He was twice appointed as editor of the influential Saudi daily al-Watan but was quickly fired both times — once after just three months on the job.
In 2015, he was named founding director of a new all-Arab satellite news channel, al-Arab, bankrolled by bin Talal. After four years of preparations, the broadcaster went on the air on Feb. 1, 2015, from a lavish studio in the World Trade Center in Manama, Bahrain. But the station quickly ran into trouble when it aired, during one of its first shows, a segment that featured a Shiite dissident critical of Bahrain’s violent crackdown on Arab Spring protesters four years earlier.
Bahraini officials halted all programming that same day, citing technical difficulties. Al-Arab would never come back.
Afterward, the man who was twice fired from newspaper jobs for allowing the expression of dissenting views seemed genuinely surprised that the TV project was shut down, said Salem, his Washington friend.
“His goal was to create a first-rate media outlet with the highest standards, in Arabic, because it was important to him that Arabs could access this kind of information,” she said. “He felt that the people in power would keep their word. He said, ‘They told me it would be protected.’ ”
Patrons sidelined, arrested
For some of Mr. Khashoggi’s friends and colleagues, the question that has reverberated since his disappearance and killing inside a Saudi consulate is simply: Why? Why should the mild criticisms of a gregarious, well-connected Saudi citizen so enrage the country’s crown prince?
“That’s the question,” the Saudi friend said. “You have four or five people in London that were far more dangerous for the government than Jamal. From the beginning, I was really surprised.”
One obvious contributing factor, some say, was the dramatic power shift in Saudi Arabia since Mohammed’s assent to power. Previously, Mr. Khashoggi’s main patrons in the government were members of the al-Faisal branch of the royal family, including Turki and Prince Khalid al-Faisal, who was the journalist’s boss while he served as editor at al-Watan. But over the last two years, many of his backers were sidelined, and some were arrested by the crown prince, who has cracked down on all forms of dissent while also liberalizing certain aspects of Saudi society and culture.
After Mr. Khashoggi was barred last year from writing his weekly column in Al-Hayat, a Saudi-owned newspaper based in London, the pressure inside his own country became unbearable, friends say. His wife — his second — sued for divorce, citing the increasing risk to his adult children — two daughters and two sons — and Mr. Khashoggi moved into a condo in McLean, Va., in the Washington suburbs. Soon afterward, he accepted an offer to become a regular contributor to The Post’s “Global Opinions” column.
“I’m under so much pressure from family members and friends to stay silent. But this isn’t right,” he explained in a text message to Karen Attiah, the section editor who recruited him. “We have enough Arab failing states. I don’t want my country to be one, too.”
His Post columns, translated into English, gave Mr. Khashoggi a powerful new platform and a vastly larger global audience. Yet many Saudi dissidents remained suspicious, and some resisted his efforts to recruit them for a new pro-democracy foundation he talked of launching.
“Jamal used to work for the government for the last 30 or 35 years, and because of that, he was away from dissidents,” said Omar Abdulaziz, a 27-year-old Saudi activist in Canada who runs a popular YouTube channel. “When he left the country and decided to criticize the Saudi government, the majority of them were saying, ‘You know what? Maybe Jamal is a spy.’ ”
Yahya Assiri, a London-based activist who runs the ALQST human rights organization, said he also was skeptical when Mr. Khashoggi phoned him one day to see if he was willing to help.
“You used to be pro-government, and now you want to work with us,” Assiri recalled telling Mr. Khashoggi. The journalist replied that he had been supportive all along but had sought to work within the system — an option that was no longer tenable for him.
“I completely support your demands, when you demand democracy, when you demand human rights,” he quoted Mr. Khashoggi as saying. “But I was trying to do this reform from inside the country, from inside the regime.”
While writing his Post column, Mr. Khashoggi continued to lobby friends to help him launch his new foundation, which he had tentatively decided to call Democracy for Arab World Now, or DAWN, to be jointly based in the United States and Turkey. He also turned his efforts to online activism, funding a project to build what he called a “bee army” to counter pro-government trolls on social media platforms such as Twitter. He put up $5,000 of his own money to help buy foreign SIM cards for mobile phones, to be assigned to users in Saudi Arabia who were critical of the government but afraid to link their Saudi numbers to their Twitter accounts, activists said. About 200 SIM cards have already been assigned.
In late September, he met friends in London to discuss his various plans. Then he flew to Istanbul to deal with a bit of unfinished personal business: obtaining paperwork from Saudi Arabia that would allow him to marry his fiancee, Turkish doctoral student Hatice Cengiz.
On Oct. 2, he entered the Saudi Consulate to pick the document up in advance of the couple’s marriage, planned for the following day. He was never seen again.
His death would become a global media sensation, in part because of the brutal fashion in which he was killed, according to accounts leaked over the following days by Turkish officials, who said he was tortured and dismembered inside the consulate.
For Arab colleagues, the gruesome details bore echoes of previous slayings of writers and dissidents whose hands and fingers were mutilated to send a warning to others who might dare to pick up a pen to criticize the powerful.
“The symbolism is deliberate: If you write with your right hand, your right fingers would be cut off, or burned in acid,” said Melhem, the Lebanese journalist.
“For us, Jamal is the last in a long train of journalists, artists and scholars to be killed in the Arab world,” he said. “It has been done mostly with impunity — until now.”
joby.warrick@washpost.com
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