Saudi Arabia’s top prosecutor is recommending the death penalty for five suspects charged with ordering and carrying out the killing of Saudi writer Jamal Khashoggi, in a move that appears designed to protect the country’s powerful crown prince Mohammed bin Salman.
A spokesman for Saudi Al-Mojeb told journalists in a rare press conference in Riyadh on Thursday that Khashoggi’s killers had set in motion plans for the killing on 29 September, three days before he was killed inside the kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul. Prince Mohammed was not implicated in the murder, he added.
The announcement follows growing international outcry over the killing of Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist and critic of the Saudi rulers who was last seen entering the consulate on 2 October to obtain paperwork for his marriage.
Khashoggi died after being drugged and then dismembered, a spokesman for the public prosecutor’s office said, in the first Saudi confirmation of how he was killed.
The deputy chief of Saudi Arabia’s intelligence, General Ahmed al-Assiri, gave the order to repatriate Khashoggi – and “the head of the negotiating team” that flew to the Istanbul consulate had ordered his murder, the spokesman said.
After repeated denials, Saudi Arabia finally admitted in mid-October that Khashoggi had been murdered at the compound, but blamed it on a “rogue” operation.
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