Al-Jazeera correspondent, according to sources in the Turkish Ministry of Justice, Saturday evening, said that a court in Istanbul approved the indictment in the case of the assassination of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
The regulations prepared by the office of the public prosecutor in the Republic of Istanbul demand that punished isolated Saudi officials, Ahmed Asiri and Saud Al-Qahtani, be sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labor, to plan and deliberately kill the victim, and with torture.
The indictment also calls for the application of life imprisonment to the team accused of carrying out the assassination and torture, and they number 19 people, headed by Mansour Othman Aba Hussein, Maher Abdul Aziz Al-Mutrab and Salah Al-Tabaiqi.
The Turkish prosecution said last month that it had prepared the indictment after listening to all parties, reviewing phone calls and surveillance cameras, conducting investigations in Saudi courts, and collecting all evidence about the crime.
The prosecution pointed out that a red search warrant had been issued against the accused, and that the International Police (Interpol) and the Saudi authorities had been informed of the request to extradite them to Turkey.
It is noteworthy that Jamal Khashoggi was killed on October 2, 2018 in his country's consulate in Istanbul, and the issue of his assassination has become one of the most prominent human rights and political issues circulating internationally since then.
After 18 days of denial, during which Riyadh presented conflicting explanations for the incident, it announced the death of Khashoggi after a "fight with Saudis" and the arrest of 18 citizens as part of the investigations, without revealing the location of the body.
Last December, a Saudi court sentenced five people to death and three in prison for the murder, but the Saudi public prosecutor said there was no evidence linking al-Qahtani and Asiri to the murder.