LONDON — Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to Britain has aired new details of the country’s reaction to the murder of the dissident Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi six years ago.
The Washington Post contributor was killed in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul — with a U.S. intelligence assessment concluding that Saudi Arabia’s top leadership bore responsibility for the hit.
Speaking to POLITICO’s Power Play podcast, Ambassador Prince Khalid bin Bandar al Saud rejected the claim, insisting that the Saudi royal family continues to oppose the version of events backed by the U.S. as well as the U.K.
And he disclosed that those the regime claims were responsible are still alive — casting rare light on the fate of the individuals blamed for the assassination.
No order from the top
Asked about the U.S. assessment that responsibility for Khashoggi’s death lay with senior figures, the ambassador said: “Just because an intelligence estimate out of the United States decided something … you know, intelligence agencies all over the world can be wrong.”
A detailed, declassified 2021 CIA report concluded that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had approved the operation during which Khashoggi was brutally murdered and dismembered, possibly after an attempt to kidnap him in the consulate where he had gone to pick up documents for his wedding to his Turkish fiancée.
The ambassador insisted, however, that the order to kill was “not an instruction from the top,” and parried with a claim that Israel had a worse track record of assassinations by state actors than Saudi Arabia.
Speaking to host Anne McElvoy, the kingdom’s top diplomat in London described the death and dismemberment of Khashoggi as “an awful crime — a stain on our country, not just the government but every Saudi out there,” while firmly denying any complicity by the powerful Saudi monarch.
“A group of people did something pretty horrible,” he told McElvoy. “But this is not what we do. We’ve never done that. There are others in the region who do a lot of that, including Israel.”
“Pretty horrible”
A member of the ruling House of Saud, Khalid admitted that the incident had raised questions about the secretive country’s notoriously opaque judicial system, and hit back at accusations from human rights groups about the lack of accountability in the trial and verdicts of imprisonment for a small group of officials involved in the case.
“We may not have as much transparency [as] other nations but we have due process. Our system is changing and evolving. This is one event among many that made us look at how we do things in Saudi and revisit how things happen.”
An initial attempt to impose the death penalty on a number of those convicted was overturned, and little is known of the fate of others found guilty of the conspiracy to murder Khashoggi or dispose of his body by dismembering it — nor who gave the orders to carry out the assassination.
“None are dead as far as I know,” the ambassador told the podcast.
