The White House decision came a day after an explosive New York Times report that cited US and foreign officials with direct knowledge of intelligence reports who say that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman told a top aide in 2017 that he would use “a bullet” on Khashoggi.
In back-to-back votes against Saudi Arabia, the Senate delivered an unusual rebuke of President Donald Trump’s response to the death of journalist Jamal Khashoggi and signaled new skepticism from Capitol Hill toward the longtime Middle East ally.
According to a global press freedom watchdog, 251 journalists are currently in jails around the world for charges related to their work — 68 in Turkey, 47 in China and 25 in Egypt, collectively responsible for more than half of the journalists behind bars.
A source, who has read a translated transcript of an audio recording of Jamal Khashoggi’s painful last moments, said it was clear that the Oct. 2 killing was no botched rendition attempt, but the execution of a premeditated plan to murder the journalist. During the course of the gruesome scene, the source describes Khashoggi struggling against a group of people determined to kill him.
An effort to rename a portion of street outside the Saudi Embassy “Jamal Khashoggi Way” has been put on hold after D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson decided not to consider the measure, citing a District law.
During a meeting Wednesday, Advisory Neighborhood Commission 2A, which represents the Foggy Bottom and West End neighborhoods, voted to rename a section of street outside the Saudi Embassy “Jamal Khashoggi Way.”
Advisory Neighborhood Commission 2A board members will consider a resolution to honor murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi on the very street where the Saudi Arabian embassy sits in Foggy Bottom.
First, with baby steps as he visits the United Arab Emirates, his closest allies in the Gulf region. But his ambition, as ever, is huge and impetuous.
“It’s a suffering tape, it’s a terrible tape. I’ve been fully briefed on it, there’s no reason for me to hear it,” President Donald Trump said in the interview. ”I know everything that went on in the tape without having to hear it.”
The Trump administration this week sanctioned 17 Saudi officials for their alleged role in the killing, but lawmakers have called on the administration to curtail arms sales to Saudi Arabia or take other harsher punitive measures.
Saudi Al-Mojeb told journalists in a rare news conference in Riyadh on Thursday that Jamal Khashoggi’s killers had set in motion plans for the killing on Sept. 29, three days before The Washington Post contributor was killed inside the kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul.
The fiancée of Jamal Khashoggi called for President Trump’s help in pressuring Saudi Arabia to reveal the location of the slain journalist’s body, even as she criticized the U.S. administration for its dealings with the kingdom.
U.S. colleges and universities have received more than $350 million from the Saudi government this decade, yet some are rethinking their arrangements in the wake of the killing of a journalist.
Saudi prosecutors said Thursday that Turkish evidence shows the slaying of journalist Jamal Khashoggi was premeditated, another change in the shifting Saudi Arabian narrative of what happened to the writer who was killed in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul.
Members of Congress have demanded that sanctions be imposed on Saudi Arabia over the killing of Khashoggi, who lived in self-imposed exile in the U.S. and wrote critically about Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.