French police arrested, on Tuesday (7), one of the suspects of participating in the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a critic of the regime of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
According to sources told Reuters news agency, Khaled Aedh Al-Otaibi – a former royal guard of Saudi Arabia – was detained at Roissy airport, near Paris, moments before leaving for Riyadh, the Arab country’s capital.
The murder is believed to have occurred on October 2, 2018, the last time the journalist was seen, inside the Saudi Arabian embassy in Istanbul. At the time, Khashoggi was dismembered, but to this day his remains have not been found.
The arrest that took place on Tuesday is based on a warrant issued by Turkey in 2019 and, from now on, French prosecutors must initiate a process to extradite the suspect. It is still unclear how or when he arrived in France.
Al-Otaibi was also already the target of sanctions from the United Kingdom, which accuses him of being “part of the 15-man team sent to Turkey by the Saudi authorities”, according to a report by the British government. According to the same document, the suspect was involved in concealing evidence at the residence of the Saudi consul general.
A report by the CIA, the American intelligence agency, concluded, about a month after the assassination, that the killing was ordered by Bin Salman, but the Saudi attorney general’s office denied the leader’s involvement and blamed a group of agents sent to Istanbul to repatriate Khashoggi.
The operation would then have spiraled out of control when the journalist was tied up and injected with a large amount of a drug that caused him to overdose. Khashoggi was there to pick up documents needed for his marriage to a Turkish woman.
According to the CIA, the brother of Prince Khalid bin Salman, the Saudi ambassador to the US, called the journalist days earlier and advised him to go to the consulate in Istanbul to get the documents, giving him assurances that he would be safe.
It is unclear whether Khalid knew of the plan to kill Khashoggi, but the call would have been ordered by Bin Salman. “There’s no way this [o assassinato] it happened without him being aware or involved,” said an American official at the time about the Saudi prince.
Tuesday’s arrest comes three days after French President Emmanuel Macron met in Saudi Arabia with Bin Salman. The meeting was named by Reuters as the first in Saudi lands involving major Western leaders since the assassination of Khashoggi.
President Jair Bolsonaro had already visited the country in October 2019, when he met with the Saudi prince. At the time, the Brazilian claimed to have a lot of “affinity” with Bin Salman.
Macron last week rejected accusations that he was legitimizing the crown prince and said the region’s various crises could not be resolved by ignoring Saudi Arabia.
France is one of the Arab country’s main arms suppliers, but has faced pressure to revise its sales due to the Saudi-led coalition fighting Iranian-backed rebels in Yemen — a war that has given rise to one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world.
Wanted by Reuters, the French Interior Ministry and the Saudi embassy in Paris declined to comment on Tuesday’s arrest. A Saudi official said the arrest was “a case of mistaken identity”.
This afternoon, the non-governmental organization Reporters Without Borders celebrated the arrest of the suspect. “Excellent news that the French police did not turn a blind eye to the presence of Khaled Al-Otaibi,” said the institution’s director general, Christophe Deloire.
Khashoggi’s fiancee Hatice Cengiz also celebrated the news and called for the suspect’s trial on French territory or extradition “to a country capable and willing to genuinely investigate and prosecute him, as well as the person who gave the order” to the murder.
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