Istanbul: More than a week after Saudi agents killed journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul, Saudi Arabia sent an expert team to clean up evidence of the crime, under the guise of helping with the investigation, a senior Turkish official said Monday – the latest twist in a case that has caused an international uproar.
A pro-government newspaper, Sabah, published news of the Saudi cleanup team and photographs of two of its members, whom it identified as a chemist and a toxicologist, who visited the Saudi consulate where Khashoggi was killed.
The senior Turkish official confirmed the main details of the report and said the Saudi team was sent with the knowledge of top Saudi officials. The two men travelled to Turkey for the sole purpose of covering up evidence of the killing before Turkish police were allowed to search the premises, the official said in comments relayed by electronic message.
The two men were identified as Ahmad Abdulaziz al-Jonabi, a chemist, and Khaled Yahya al-Zahrani, a toxicologist, part of a team of Saudi investigators who spent several days in Turkey visiting the consulate and the consul's residence, ostensibly to help with the investigation into Khashoggi's disappearance, the newspaper reported.
The Turkish official confirmed the names of the two individuals and said that they were part of a cleanup team. The official spoke on condition of anonymity, according to the rules of his office.
The cleanup team arrived in Istanbul on October 11, nine days after Khashoggi's death, and visited the consulate every day from October 12 to October 17, according to Sabah. Turkish investigators were not allowed into the consulate, which is considered Saudi sovereign territory, until October 15.
Sabah published photographs of al-Jonabi and al-Zahrani emerging from the entrance of the consulate and also published photographs that the newspaper's investigative editor, Abdurrahman Simsek, said were head shots from cameras at airport passport control.
Sabah has previously published photos of a member of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s entourage entering Istanbul on October 2.Credit:Sabah via AP
The men arrived on the same day as a Saudi delegation that met with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on October 11, as Turkish officials demanded to know what had happened to Khashoggi, a critic of the Saudi government who lived in the United States and wrote opinion articles for The Washington Post.
He had entered the consulate on October 2 for a prearranged meeting to collect papers that would allow him to marry his Turkish fiancé and was never seen again.
When the group identified as a cleanup team was in Turkey, Saudi officials were still insisting that Khashoggi, 59, had left the consulate safely and that they did not know where he was. They later acknowledged that he had been killed in the consulate, at first describing his death as the accidental result of a fight and later calling it premeditated.
Turkey has identified a team of 15 Saudi officials that it has accused of being the perpetrators of the murder, arriving in Turkey in the hours before Khashoggi's disappearance and leaving the same day. Some of the 15 turned out to be security officers close to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and included a top forensic specialist.
New York Times
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