Trump has pledged that he won’t whitewash the
murder and that the United States will do what’s necessary regarding
whoever was involved, though he hasn’t mentioned Prince Mohammed’s name. The time to cash the check has come earlier than Trump expected.
Saudi Arabia tried last week to lighten the load for the president by announcing the arrests of 21 suspects
and the indictment of 15, while the attorney general said he would
demand the death penalty for five, though he didn’t provide any names.
Earlier
King Salman fired Ahmed al-Asiri, the deputy intelligence chief, and
Saud al-Qahtani, Mohammed’s senior adviser. In so doing the king set a
ceiling on how high the punishment could go. But now it seems there will
be no choice but to examine his own son’s future.
According to The Washington Post, Prince
Mohammed’s brother Khalid, the Saudi ambassador to Washington, was the
one who phoned Khashoggi and encouraged him to go to the Saudi Consulate
in Istanbul. The prince’s adviser and aide, intelligence man Maher
Abdulaziz Mutrib, allegedly led the ring and after the murder phoned
Qahtani and asked him to tell the boss that it was mission accomplished.
Mutrib
didn’t explicitly say the boss’ name but Qahtani has only one boss and
that’s Prince Mohammed. The Saudi ambassador has strongly denied having
any telephone conversation with Khashoggi, and a Post reporter has
written that their last meeting came in 2017; afterward they
corresponded several times. The top Saudi prosecutor said Thursday that
Khashoggi was murdered by a “lethal injection” and that his body was
dismembered, with his organs handed to someone outside the consulate for
disposal.
