By: Yasin Aktay
Those responsible were caught in flagrante delicto in the Khashoggi murder. We have a serial-murder that took place in a building that belongs to Saudi Arabia, was carried out by people who cannot act without the approval of top state officials, and it was carried out using all means of the state. However, the Saudi Chief Prosecutor who was assigned to investigate the case by the Saudi state started dealing with the issue by excluding the persons who most possibly carried out the murder. By doing this, he assumed the role of a lawyer rather than that of a prosecutor. As a lawyer, any word he speaks turns into evidence which will be used against the suspects in the future. Of course, not for those whom he designated as suspects and demanding their execution, but against those whom he overtly tries to protect.
Forty-four days after the murder, he spoke to the cameras with an odd self-reliant manner, as if he had completely cleared up the murder. As if he had already ended his investigation, prepared his bill of indictment and decided who is guilty and who is innocent. He stated who is innocent in a definitive language.
When did he finish this investigation? He doesn’t even have all the evidence to clear up the case. What do they have in the statements of the 18 suspects they refuse to share with the Chief Public Prosecutor of Istanbul? Even those statements are meaningless unless they are supported by the evidence we have. These are officers who cannot decide to do anything on their own. Did they themselves say that no one assigned them to do such a thing and that they decided on their own to carry out such a vicious murder, which required detailed preparations to be made beforehand? Without being under any pressure?
Let’s say they agreed to this, how could the Saudi prosecutor be convinced so easily? How did they explain why they brought all those tools used to cut and destroy a human being in a plane that was assigned to them by the state? How could he believe them? Have you ever questioned what a forensic scientist is doing in a team which was assigned to talk and persuade Khashoggi?
In fact, Khashoggi loved and missed his country so much that a plain phone call from a top degree official would be enough to convince him to go back. There wasn’t any charge, conviction, or an arrest warrant issued for him anyway. Why would he be convinced to return? Perhaps the objective was to carry out the atrocity in Riyadh instead of the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul?
As the Saudi Chief Prosecutor talks, he speaks words which will be used against those he tries to protect. There is more than one murder. Serial murders, so to speak.
Only one person died, but what was done before and after the murder is as serious as a serial murder. His murder counts as only one murder but the dismembering of his body, moving it outside the consulate and doing some other things to his body parts, then the lies told for 12 days about what happened to him, the tampering of the evidence they attempted to do in the glare of publicity; all these many other offenses are combined with the original one and turns the matter into a serial murder.
The Saudi Office of the Chief Prosecution admitted that the murder was planned beforehand, but now they are saying that the murder was carried out after the team consisting of those 15 people decided instantaneously. They told this story by saying that there was a “brawl” inside the consulate when Khashoggi entered, but since they were not able to convince anyone they gave up on telling this story and confessed that the murder was planned beforehand. Now we are going back to where we started: Why?
Similarly, regarding the whereabouts of the body, the chief prosecutor denied the statement pointing to a “local co-conspirator” by Minister of Foreign Affairs Adel al-Jubeir. He even said that this statement was not made by Jubeir but made up by the media and he said that he did not find this claim convincing. Now, again, and this time officially, there is a return to the “local co-conspirator” scenario. Thus a country’s chief prosecutor expects us to believe a statement which even kids would find ridiculous. So, they gave the body, after going through all that trouble and planning this murder and therefore committing a huge crime, to someone who happened to be passing by? You know, they still don’t even know who this “local co-conspirator” is, they now can only try to guess his facial features.
By the way, they are trying to keep blame away from everyone, particularly Qahtani, by saying that it was carried out incidentally solely by the team that went to Istanbul. They have no one to blame but the execution team. Obviously, they are unprotected, they don’t have the insurance of being a member of a tribe or they don’t have the support of a tribe.
Whichever way you cut it, the only good thing about this story which has no plausibility is their struggle to hide those actually responsible with the contradictory words they utter. Through these statements they make efforts to hide the guilty ones but it reveals the responsible parties.
In my opinion, we don’t even need to look for more evidence anymore. We should be patient for a little longer, and the story will unfold all its truth.
