US concludes Saudi crown prince approved Khashoggi operation

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US intelligence has concluded that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman approved an operation in Turkey to “capture or kill” veteran journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

The four-page report declassified by the Biden administration and released on Friday said the assessment was based on factors including Prince Mohammed’s “control of decision-making in the kingdom”.

The report pointed to direct involvement of key lieutenants of the crown prince in the 2018 operation against Khashoggi, as well as members of his elite protective detail. It also noted the crown prince’s personal “support for using violent measures to silence dissidents abroad, including Khashoggi”.

One of Saudi Arabia’s most prominent journalists, Khashoggi was killed at the kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul in October 2018 and his body dismembered.

The report stopped short of describing the operation as a mission to kill Khashoggi from the outset. “We do not know whether these individuals knew in advance that the operation would result in Khashoggi’s death,” the report said. It did not present any new evidence directly linking Prince Mohammed to the killing.

Although the findings were expected, the US agencies’ assessment is embarrassing for Prince Mohammed, who is the kingdom’s day-to-day ruler and has sought to put the murder behind him. It will bring fresh scrutiny on his autocratic leadership and threatens to strain relations between the US and one of its traditional Arab allies.

Antony Blinken, US secretary of state, issued a new visa restriction policy named the “Khashoggi Ban” on Friday aimed at individuals who work on behalf of foreign governments to target dissidents abroad. Blinken said the US had imposed the ban on 76 Saudi individuals “believed to have been engaged in threatening dissidents overseas, including but not limited to the Khashoggi killing”. The names will not be made public.

The Biden administration faces a complex balancing act to make good on the president’s campaign promise to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah” while still maintaining a strategic relationship with the world’s top oil exporter and an important regional security partner. President Joe Biden’s team has pledged to “recalibrate” the relationship.

Almost a year after Khashoggi was murdered, Prince Mohammed said he took “full responsibility” for the killing as “a leader of Saudi Arabia”. But Riyadh has consistently sought to characterise the murder as a rogue operation and denied that Prince Mohammed had any knowledge of it.

The US assessment said it was “highly unlikely that Saudi officials would have carried out an operation of this nature without the crown prince’s authorisation”, citing his “absolute control of the kingdom’s security and intelligence organisations” since 2017.

The report named 21 Saudi officials who it said “participated in, ordered, or were otherwise complicit in or responsible for” the murder of Khashoggi on behalf of Prince Mohammed. They included Saud al-Qahtani, who was an adviser to the crown prince and considered by many to be his enforcer, and Ahmed al-Asiri, who was deputy intelligence chief at the time.

Qahtani was among 17 Saudis the Trump administration sanctioned for their alleged role in the operation. The designations did not include Asiri.

After the report’s release on Friday, the Treasury announced sanctions against Asiri, subjecting him to a US asset freeze. It also placed sanctions on the Rapid Intervention Force, an elite personal protective detail whose mission is to defend the crown prince.

Donald Trump, the former US president, had stood by Prince Mohammed as the killing triggered Saudi Arabia’s biggest diplomatic crisis in years.

Saudi authorities put 11 people on trial for the killing and eight were convicted of murder. But their names were never released under Saudi law, and human rights activists condemned what they described as a sham trial that exonerated the masterminds. Qahtani and Asiri were cleared because of what the Saudi authorities said was a lack of evidence.

The White House has already said Biden would not speak directly to Prince Mohammed, whose direct counterpart is Lloyd Austin, US defence secretary, but is keen to preserve the countries’ relationship.

According to a White House readout of Biden’s first conversation as US president with King Salman, Prince Mohammed’s father, on Thursday, the American leader said he wanted to “make the bilateral relationship as strong and transparent as possible”.

Mark Warner, a Democratic senator from Virginia who chairs the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said after the report’s release: “For too long, the United States failed to hold Saudi Arabia accountable for the brutal murder of journalist, dissident, and Virginia resident Jamal Khashoggi.”

Tamara Wittes, a senior fellow expert at the Brookings Institution said she did not think it was a realistic prospect to blacklist the crown prince, but she added: “The ball is in the Saudi court to take full responsibility.”

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