French police released this Wednesday (8) the Saudi man detained at an airport near Paris on suspicion of participating in the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a critic of the regime of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Officials concluded that there was an identity confusion and that it was not Khaled Aedh Al-Otaibi, a former Saudi Arabian Royal Guard named as involved in the crime. An official told the AFP news agency that the detainee was a namesake.
Prosecutors in the case communicated the Saudi’s release after confirming that he did not fit a warrant issued by Turkey to two former aides to the Crown Prince and which served as the basis for his arrest.
Hours earlier, however, members of the Saudi embassy in Paris had already claimed that the detainee had no connection with the case. Speaking on condition of anonymity to the American newspaper Washington Post, with which Khashoggi collaborated, an official said that it was a question of mistaken identity, as the real Al-Otaibi was already in prison.
The journalist was last seen entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, where he went in search of documents necessary for his marriage to a Turkish woman. The murder is believed to have occurred on October 2, 2018, when he was dismembered, but to date his remains have not been found.
News of the arrest of one of the suspects — when it was thought he was in fact the wanted man — sparked a wave of reactions, with human rights groups and Khashoggi’s fiancee Hatice Cengiz expressing relief.
After the deception was announced, the non-governmental organization Reporters Without Borders said it “remains fully committed to ensuring that everyone involved in the murder is brought to justice before an independent judiciary.”
A United Nations report published two years ago showed that Al-Otaibi was a member of a 15-man team involved in the journalist’s murder and sent to Turkey by Saudi authorities.
An investigation by the CIA, the American intelligence agency, concluded 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 an overdose.
According to the CIA, Khalid bin Salman, brother of the prince and Saudi ambassador to the US at the time of the crime, called the journalist days before and advised him to go to the consulate in Istanbul to get the documents, giving 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] have happened without him being aware of or involved,” said an American official on the Saudi prince.
In 2019, a Saudi court sentenced five people to death and another three to prison for involvement in the case. Later, however, he overturned the final verdict and turned the death sentences into prisons with sentences ranging from seven to 20 years. At the time, the United Nations classified the trial as a “parody of justice”.
The mistaken arrest came three days after French President Emmanuel Macron met with Bin Salman in Saudi Arabia. The meeting was named as the first in Saudi lands involving major Western leaders since Khashoggi’s assassination.
Paris sees the country as a key player in helping to forge peace across the region with Iran, as well as a major player in the fight against fundamentalist factions in the Middle East.
.
