Al-Jazeera correspondent in Istanbul, quoting Turkish judicial sources, stated that the first trial sessions of those accused of killing the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul will start next Friday, July 3, and the sources added that the trial will be in absentia because the Saudi defendants could not be brought in after Riyadh refused to hand them over to the judicial authorities. Turkish.
Judicial sources stated that the General Prosecutor of the Republic in Istanbul asked the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs to issue an international arrest warrant to arrest the accused and bring them to trial. On April 11, the Turkish public prosecutor published the full indictment against 20 Saudi defendants who had participated in the brutal planning and execution of Khashoggi's killing, slicing and concealment of his body on October 2, 2018.
Those included in the indictment and trial list in Istanbul are the Saudi assassination team that carried out the killing of Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate, as well as those who planned it, and they are Saud Al-Qahtani, advisor to the Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman, and Ahmed Al-Asiri, deputy chief of Saudi intelligence at the time.
The contents of the indictment
The indictment included new pictures of Khashoggi, which are being published for the first time, and also the statements of employees of the Saudi consulate in Istanbul who were investigated. The list included photographs of the defendants' passports - some of them diplomat - and their phone numbers used on the day of the crime.
Al-Jazeera correspondent said that the list also includes information about the contacts made by Khashoggi’s assassination team before and after the crime, as well as the statements of Turkish employees indicating that they were asked not to go up to the Saudi consul’s floor.
The Turkish Public Prosecution List stated that Khashoggi’s computer contained pictures of threatening letters to him, and pictures of tweets that threaten him and threaten him.
Children’s pardon
Salah Khashoggi, son of the murdered Saudi journalist, last May posted on his Twitter account a short statement saying, “We announce the sons of the martyr Jamal Khashoggi that we are pardoned for killing our father.”
Analysts believe that this declaration would spare five persons whose identities were not revealed and who were sentenced to death in December in Saudi Arabia, to apply the penalty against them.
Commenting on Salah Khashoggi’s tweet, Khadija Genghis’s fiancée Jamal Khashoggi said that no one has the right to pardon his murder “because his disgraceful murder will not be subject to statute of limitations,” while the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial killings called Anees Kalamar a pardon.