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‘Premeditated execution’: Saudi Arabia responsible for Khashoggi’s murder, says UN investigator

A UN investigator said on Wednesday that Riyadh bears responsibility for the barbaric killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Khashoggi was a victim of “a deliberate, premeditated execution, an extrajudicial killing for which the state of Saudi Arabia is responsible,” Agnes Callamard, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, said, calling for a further probe into Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s role in the crime.

She made the remarks following the end of a six-month inquiry into the case. The rapporteur called for an additional probe into the role senior Saudi officials, including Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, may have played in Khashoggi’s murder.

Saudi Minister of Foreign Affairs Adel al-Jubeir rejected Callamard’s allegation on Wednesday, claiming that the case had already been ‘investigated’ by Saudi authorities and insisted it remain within the kingdom’s jurisdiction.

“We categorically reject any attempts to tarnish the leaders of the [Saudi] Kingdom and any attempts to take the case out of the Saudi justice jurisdiction,” al-Jubeir tweeted.

A critic of the Saudi Royal family and Washington Post contributor, Khashoggi was brutally murdered by Saudi government hitmen in October after he entered Riyadh’s consulate in Istanbul, Turkey.

Turkish officials say that he was murdered by a hit squad dispatched by the Saudis. Riyadh, after lying and vehemently denying that anything at all happened to Khashoggi at first, later, faced with undeniable evidence, claimed that the journalist had died in a ‘spontaneous fistfight’ and denied that the royal family was in any way involved in the incident.

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