HRW Urges Saudi Arabia to Reveal Khashoggi’s Fate

Local Editor

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman should immediately release all evidence and information Saudi Arabia holds regarding the status of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Human Rights Watch said.

Khashoggi, 59, entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2, 2018, and has not been seen or heard from since.

While Saudi Arabia denied involvement in his disappearance, it claimed that he left the consulate alone shortly after his arrival, but produced no evidence to support the claim.

Saudi authorities escalated repression against dissidents and critics since bin Salman became crown prince in June 2017.

Relatively, Khashoggi’s fiancé, a Turkish national, told media outlets that he entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on the afternoon of October 2 to obtain documents necessary for their marriage, and that he left her his phones and instructions to alert the authorities if he did not return after two hours. That was the last time his fiancé saw him.

Meanwhile, bin Salman denied that Saudi Arabia captured Khashoggi in an interview with Bloomberg on October 5, claiming “if he’s in Saudi Arabia I would know that,” and the Saudi ambassador to the US, Prince Khalid bin Salman, the crown prince’s brother, described all the allegations as “baseless” and “absolutely false.”

Saudi officials, however, produced no evidence that Khashoggi ever left the embassy, and Khalid bin Salman told The Washington Post that the consulate’s security cameras “were not recording” on October 2.

In the same respect, Saudi authorities also targeted Saudi citizens abroad in recent months, including directing the kidnapping of a prominent women’s rights advocate, Loujain al-Hathloul, from the United Arab Emirates and her husband Fahad al-Butairi from Jordan in March 2018, forcibly returning both to Saudi Arabia.

Source: HRW, Edited by website team