Turkey on Thursday closed the court case for the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi and sent it to Saudi Arabia.a decision criticized by human rights organizations and appealed by the victim’s fiancee.
The 59-year-old critical journalist, a contributor to the American newspaper The Washington Post, was murdered on October 2, 2018 at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, where he was strangled and later dismembered.
The last hearing of the absentee trial against 26 Saudis opened in July 2020 lasted just a few minutes before the Istanbul court judge announced his decision: “We have decided to transfer the case to Saudi Arabia.”
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The outcome was expected. In the previous hearing, the prosecutor had requested this transfer, alleging that the case “has been delayed” because the court orders cannot be executed since the suspects are foreigners.
And the Minister of Justice, Bekir Bozdag, indicated last week that he would give the green light to this request from the prosecution.
In need of investment in the midst of a serious economic crisis, Turkey was in a hurry to close this matter and resume its relations with Saudi Arabia, whose Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salmán was affected by this event.
“Here we are not governed by a family like in Saudi Arabia. We have a judicial system that responds to citizens’ complaints: under this title, we will file an appeal,” Khashoggi’s fiancée Hatice Cengiz told the court.
For her, the Turkish prosecutor satisfied the “Saudi demands”. “We know very well that the authorities will do nothing. How can we imagine that the killers will investigate themselves?” she stated.
One of his lawyers, Gokmen Baspinar, assured that “this decision to transfer the dossier is against the law” and “constitutes a violation of Turkish sovereignty.”
“There is no legal action in Saudi Arabia. The Saudi authorities have already closed the process and decided to acquit numerous suspects,” the lawyer said.
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rejection of the decision
Organizations for the defense of human rights denounced this attempt to bury the judicial process against the 26 defendants, two of whom were close friends of the crown prince.
For Erol Önderoglu, a representative of Reporters Without Borders in Istanbul, the decision “sends a terrifying signal about the respect that Turkey gives to press freedom.”
“The court has agreed to transfer Saudi Arabia like this, in a sentence, without even (warning) the lawyers of the rejection of their requests,” Milena Büyüm, Amnesty International’s representative in Turkey, outraged on Twitter.
The secretary general of this organization, Agnes Callamard, had investigated the murder in 2019 as a UN special rapporteur and warned in her report of “credible evidence” of Mohamed bin Salmán’s links to the murder and his attempted cover-up.
“Turkey will be voluntarily and knowingly returning the case to those who are responsible,” he said before the trial was officially closed.
A report by US intelligence services accused the crown prince of having “validated” the murder, carried out by a commando of agents from Saudi Arabia who later disposed of the body.
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Having denied the murder, Riyadh finally admitted that it had been committed, but by Saudi agents acting on their own.
Initially, five people were sentenced to death for the murder, but a Saudi court overturned the sentence and ordered up to 20 years in prison for eight defendants whose identities were not revealed in an opaque legal proceeding.
To Riyadh’s disappointment, Turkey went ahead with the case and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said at the time that the order for the assassination “came from the highest levels” of the Saudi government.
In the following years, albeit unofficially, Saudi Arabia has tried to pressure the Turkish economy by boycotting its imports.
Now, in the midst of a crisis that has plunged its currency and triggered inflation and growing international isolation that has reduced foreign investment, Turkey is trying to get closer to other regional powers such as Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Israel or Saudi Arabia itself.
His foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, visited Riyadh last year and Erdogan said in January that he plans to visit the kingdom.
AFP
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