(GNB- Desk): Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman approved an operation to capture or kill a US based journalist Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, according to a U.S. intelligence report released on Friday.
“We assess that Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman approved an operation in Istanbul, Turkey to capture or kill Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi,” the first line of the four-page report’s executive summary states.
“We base this assessment on the Crown Prince’s control of decision-making in the Kingdom, the direct involvement of a key adviser and members of Muhammad bin Salman’s protective detail in the operation, and the Crown Prince’s support for using violent measures to silence dissidents abroad, including Khashoggi,” the summary continues.
The Biden administration provided the long-awaited declassified intelligence report to Congress ahead of its public release on Friday.
The four-page report, titled “Assessing the Saudi Government’s Role in the Killing of Jamal Khashoggi” is dated February 11 and marked as declassified by Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines on February 25.
The report says that since 2017 Prince Mohammed has had “absolute control” over the kingdom’s security and intelligence organizations, which makes it “highly unlikely that Saudi officials would have carried out an operation of this nature without the Crown Prince’s authorization.”
Khashoggi, 59, was a Saudi citizen living in Northern Virginia and writing columns for The Washington Post that were often critical of the Saudi monarchy. Khashoggi was once an adviser to the Saudi government and close to the royal family, but fell out of favor and went into self-imposed exile in the US in 2017. From there, he wrote a monthly column in the Washington Post in which he criticised the policies of Prince Mohammed.
He was killed during a visit to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2, 2018. His body was dismembered and his remains have never been found, and a United Nations report released in 2019 said the murder had been carefully planned.
Saudi Arabia initially denied knowledge of what happened to Khashoggi. But in the face of intense international pressure, the kingdom admitted that Khashoggi was killed in a “rogue” extradition operation gone wrong, but it denied any involvement by the crown prince. Five men given the death penalty for the murder had their sentences commuted to 20 years in jail after being forgiven by Khashoggi’s family.
In early 2019, Congress passed a law giving the Trump administration 30 days to release an unclassified version of the Director of National Intelligence’s report providing “a determination and evidence with respect to the advance knowledge and role of any current or former official of Saudi Arabia.” But that deadline passed for nearly two years, as Khashoggi’s supporters filed a federal lawsuit for the transparency that Trump refused.
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