Saudi Arabia rejects Turkey’s extradition request in Khashoggi killing

Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister on Saturday rejected a call by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey to try the suspects in the killing of dissident commentator Jamal Khashoggi in that country, saying that the men arrested would be prosecuted on Saudi soil.

Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir called the international outrage over the killing “fairly hysterical” and said that once the Saudi investigation was complete, the suspects would be held accountable “in Saudi Arabia.”

“Unfortunately, there has been this hysteria in the media before the investigation was complete,” he said during a panel at the Manama Dialogue, which was organised by the International Institute for Strategic Studies in Manama, the capital of Bahrain.

Khashoggi, a Virginia resident and a columnist for The Washington Post who was also a critic of Saudi Arabia’s rulers, was killed Oct 2 by a team of Saudi agents in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul.

Turkish officials have said that the agents dismembered Khashoggi with a bone saw in order to dispose of the body, as part of a premeditated assassination. Many current and former Western officials have argued that such an operation could have been authorised only by Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

In a speech this past week, Erdogan called on Saudi Arabia to extradite any suspects for a trial in Turkey. He has argued that the rulers of Saudi Arabia face a conflict of interest in overseeing any trial because the killing was ordered and directed from within the Saudi government for political reasons.

Al-Jubeir’s remarks Saturday amounted to a rejection of Erdogan’s request for extradition, as expected. The foreign minister also did not directly respond to questions about how the kingdom would persuade its allies that Crown Prince Mohammed had no ties to the killing.

Saudi Arabia acknowledged that Khashoggi had died inside the consulate only after more than two weeks of changing stories.

Defence Secretary Jim Mattis, who spoke at the conference earlier in the day, promised the United States would seek to hold accountable those responsible for the death, though he did not mention Saudi Arabia by name.

© 2018 New York Times News Service