Five death sentences for Khashoggi murder. The Saudi consul acquitted and released

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by Fabio Giuseppe Carlo Carisio

UPDATE SEPTEMBER 7, 2020

The death sentence for 5 people accused of the murder of journalist Jamal Kashoggi has been canceled. The Court of Appeal has in fact pardoned previous convicts by inflicting lighter sentences on all eight people accused of the brutal murder of the Washington Post columnist: five were sentenced to 20 years in prison, while three others had sentences ranging between 7 and 10 years.

The Saudi verdict on the Khashoggi case is “the umpteenth act of this parody of justice”, these sentences “have no legal or moral legitimacy”. Thus the UN responsible for extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions Agnes Callamard, commented on Twitter the sentence that sentenced eight people to prison terms for the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Callamard denounced the fact that “the high-level officials who organized the execution remained free from the start” and Saudi prince Mohammed Bin Salman “remained well protected from any kind of significant investigation in his country”.

“A farce”. This is how Hatice Cengiz, Jamal Khashoggi’s girlfriend, defined the court ruling that in Saudi Arabia sentenced eight people to prison terms in relation to the journalist’s murder and accused Riyadh of wanting to close this case without indicating the instigator of the murder.

ARTICLE POSTED ON DECEMBER,23, 2019

The truth about the death of the Arab journalist Jamal Kashoggi will probably be buried along with the corpses of those sentenced to death. The Court of Riyadh in fact issued the death sentence against five people held responsible for the murder and dismissal of the Washington Post columnist, which took place within the consulate of Saudi Arabia in Istanbul, Turkey, in 2018.

Saudi prosecutors also announced that three other people were sentenced to 24 years in prison for trying to “cover up the crime”. All the condemned can appeal. But more than the “scapegoats” and material perpetrators of the crime, deemed not premeditated but accidental by the judges, the names of the authorities considered extraneous to the barbaric assassination arouse interest.

Saud al-Qahtani (left) with the crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman

Saud al-Qahtani, believed to be the personal assistant and former person responsible for the communication on social media of the Saudi crown prince, Mohamed bin Salman, has not been indicted. According to investigations conducted by UN experts there were instead “credible evidence” of individual responsibilities of the prince and his adviser, as reported by RaiNews.

Saudi Consul General at Istanbul Mohammed al-Otaibi

The Tribunal also found Mohammed al-Otaibi, Saudi Consul General in Istanbul at the material time, not guilty. The diplomat was released from prison after the verdict was announced, state TV reported. The international pressures of the US State Department which announced on December 10 last year that Mohammed Al-Otaibi had been accused of serious human rights violations in the case of the murder of the dissident journalist were of no use.

The trial of the accused was conducted behind closed doors, in almost total secrecy and, according to Human Rights Watch, did not meet international standards. Only a few diplomats, including Turks, and members of the Khashoggi family had been allowed to attend the hearings, nine in all, which established the unintentionality of killing for the five sentenced to death, Saudi official TV said.

“We concluded that Khashoggi’s murder was not expected,” reads the prosecutor’s statement. The one that led to the death of Khashoggi, whose body has never been found, has no longer been defined by the Saudi prosecutor as a “rogue operation”. Jamal Khashoggi had entered his country’s consulate in Istanbul on the morning of October 2, 2018 to obtain the documents to marry his Turkish girlfriend, Hatice Cengiz, who had been waiting for him outside.

“There is credible evidence that warrants further investigation into the possible involvement of Saudi Crown Prince Mohamed Bin Salman (and other Wahhabi Kingdom officials) in the killing of the Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi,” a strongly critic of the Saudi Crown.

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The 101-page report drawn up by the UN human rights experts investigating the case, led by Agnes Callamard, stated this in recent months: In the same report it is claimed that “the journalist Jamal Khashoggi was the victim of a deliberate and premeditated execution”. This was not the case according to the Court of Riyadh although the man’s body was torn to pieces and therefore concealed. Furthermore, it was also made to believe that Kashoggi had left the Consulate.

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“Saudi Arabia is responsible under international law for the extrajudicial killing of Khashoggi,” said Callamard in his report prepared on the basis of the first independent investigation into the killing of the journalist.

The United Nations special rapporteur for extrajudicial or arbitrary executions went to Turkey to head a group of UN experts to investigate the case. In recent months, he denounced the lack of transparency in the hearings in Saudi Arabia of the trial of the 11 accused accused of the murder kept secret by the authorities, asking that the names of the defendants and the fate of 10 other people initially arrested be revealed.