• Middle East: Lessons from Saudi journalism under the shadow of Jamal Khashoggi

One of the first statements in the trial for the murder of the Saudi columnist has served to recall the gruesome scenes related to that event. There could be more. According to a former Turkish employee of the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul, a furnace could enter the equation of the events that led to one of the biggest political scandals that occurred two years ago, and that had as protagonist the Saudi crown prince Mohamed bin Salman.

The first hearing took place last Friday in an Istanbul court. No one sat on the bench . The twenty defendants, 18 members of the team of assassins sent by Riyadh to Istanbul to finish off Jamal Khashoggi, and two senior officials from the Kingdom of the desert - Ahmed Asiri, former Deputy Director of Intelligence, and Saud Qahtani, former adviser to bin Salman -, they are tried in absentia for " premeditated murder with monstrous intent ".

The statement by coach Zeki Demir, obtained by the local media, seems to confirm this point. On October 2, 2018, less than an hour after the critic of the Saudi monarchy entered the diplomatic legation - saying goodbye at the door of Hatice Cengiz, his girlfriend, whom he would not see again - Demir was called from unforeseen to go to the consul's residence, a building located near the consulate, in the Levent district.

"Five or six people forbade me from entering the building. They urged me to turn on the oven. There was an atmosphere of panic. It seemed they wanted me to leave as soon as possible," Demir added to the judge, according to the Turkish newspaper Hürriyet. Demir did so, but not before letting out a perhaps prophetic joke: " If you fall into the oven you will make yourself kebab ", the worker commented, to which the Saudis present, with a grim face, responded with a "yallah" , an expression equivalent to the Spanish "tira, vete".

The lighted oven was a tandoor type. It is a cylindrical or oval instrument, shaped like a container, commonly used in eastern countries to heat bread or meat. A police report, obtained by the Middle East Eye in February 2019, stated that the furnace could reach temperatures of up to 1,000 degrees Celsius, "enough to burn all DNA evidence without a trace."

Zeki Demir also assured that, while leaving a building, he saw a vehicle coming that was parked at the door. As they made to open the garage, those present did not allow it. Also, he emphasized, days later he could verify that both the oven and the kitchen had been meticulously cleaned . "Even the color of the marble had changed. It changed due to the effect of aqua fortis [acid]," he said.

After the recognition by Saudi Arabia of the murder of the columnist for the Washington Post, although alleging that it was an accidental event and blaming a group of lower-ranking officials for it, one of the main unknowns is what happened to the corpse of Khashoggi, tortured and dismembered in the consul's office. At first it was believed that the assassins used acid to get rid of the body, throwing it in a tank full of that substance.

Another of the theories that the Turkish investigators use, and that seems to get paid after the first statements of the trial, is that the assassins tried to reduce Khashoggi to ashes. According to their inquiries, Saudi envoys burned the body for at least three days. Subsequently, they burned meat for human consumption to cover up their activity. A 2018 police report notes that the Saudi consulate ordered 32 servings of raw meat from a well-known local restaurant after the murder.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

Know more

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  • Jamal Khashoggi

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