[ad_1]
BEIRUT – Turkish authorities on Monday requested a second visit to the consulate of Saudi Arabia in Istanbul since disappearance of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi last week. Khashoggi disappeared after a visit to the consulate and his friends and allies suspect that he was killed inside the building.
Turkish officials said the Washington Post contributor was killed at the consulate and his body was later kidnapped. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has not confirmed the alleged murder, saying that he would wait for the outcome of an investigation.
Saudi Arabia insisted that Khashoggi leave the Istanbul consulate and disappear somewhere after a brief visit to the country. Neither party presented any evidence in support of its argument, even though the consulate was surrounded by security cameras, inside and out.
A Turkish official said Monday that the ambassador of Saudi Arabia to Turkey had been summoned to the ministry to seek Riyadh's cooperation in connection with an investigation into Khashoggi's disappearance. A ministry official said Deputy Foreign Minister Sedat Onal met with the Saudi ambassador on Sunday. NTV private television said Turkey had asked permission to search the consulate building.
"It was made known that we were waiting for full coordination of the investigation process," the ministry said, according to the Reuters news agency.
A Turkish official told the Associated Press that Turkey had "deepened" its investigation, without providing more details.
Protesters, including Khashoggi's associates, gathered Monday in front of the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul to ask for answers.
US authorities have also expressed concern about the journalist's whereabouts. Detectives Marco Rubio (Florida) and Chris Murphy (Connecticut) said they would examine the options available to the US legislature to find out the truth about what happened in Turkey.
The US State Department is also investigating his disappearance.
Who is Jamal Khashoggi?
Khashoggi was once a Saudi insider. A close associate of the former head of the kingdom's spies, he had played a leading role in the country's major dailies, including major English newspapers.
Khashoggi, trained in the United States, was no stranger to the controversy.
A graduate of Indiana State University, Khashoggi began his career in the 1980s, covering the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and the ensuing decade of war for the English-language Saudi Gazette. He traveled extensively in the Middle East, covering the war of Algeria against Islamist militants in the 1990s, and the rise of Islamists in Sudan.
He interviewed Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan prior to the formation of Al-Qaida and then met him in Sudan in 1995. Following his ascent, bin Laden probably helped to consolidate Khashoggi's ties with the mighty former head of Saudi spies, Turki Al-Faisal.
Once an insider
Khashoggi rubbed shoulders with the Saudi royal family and supported efforts to encourage ultra-conservative monks in the kingdom to accept reforms. He worked for nine years in the Islamist-appearing al-Madina newspaper and was often quoted in the Western media as an expert on Islamic radicals and as a reformist spokesman.
However, he was fired from his position as editor-in-chief of Al-Watan, a liberal newspaper founded after the September 11 terrorist attacks, just two months after he took office in 2003. The country's ultra-conservative clerics They were pushed against him. Criticism of the powerful religious police and Ibn Taymiyah, a medieval cleric regarded as the spiritual ancestor of Wahhabism, the conservative interpretation of Islam who is the founding tenant of the kingdom.
Khoshaggi then served as media advisor to Al-Faisal, the former head of the spies, who was at the time ambassador to the United States.
"I had to take a stand"
Khashoggi returned to Al-Watan in 2007, where he continued to criticize the clerics while the late King Abdullah implemented cautious reforms to try to shake them up. Three years later, he is forced to resign again after a series of articles criticizing Salafism, the ultra-conservative movement of Sunni Islam at the origin of Wahhabism.
In 2010, Saudi billionaire Alwaleed bin Talal called him to lead his new TV channel, touted as a rival of the Al-Jazeera group, funded by Qatar, a fervent critic of the kingdom. But the new Al-Arab channel, based in Bahrain, was closed several hours after its launch for hosting a personality of the Bahraini opposition.
Khoshaggi's latest break with the Saudi authorities followed the Arab Spring protests that swept the region in 2011, undermining the power of traditional leaders and giving rise to Islamists, before being followed by unprecedented repressive measures in the region. against those who call for change. Standing alongside the opposition in Egypt and Syria, Khashoggi became a virulent critic of his own government's position in that country and a supporter of moderate Islamists, which Riyadh considered an existential threat.
"It was a critical period in Arab history, I had to take a stand, the Arab world had been waiting for this moment of freedom for a thousand years," Khashoggi told Syrian-based opposition TV channel in Turkey last month. faded away.
He also criticized his government diplomatic break with Qatar and war in Yemen as well as Riyadh's policy vis-à-vis its arch-nemesis, Iran, whose influence grew in Yemen and Syria.
Heir prince"?
In the September 23 interview, he called Saudi Arabia's foreign policy "narrow-minded" and ridiculed his crackdown on political Islam, urging the kingdom to realign its partnership policy with Turkey, a close ally of Qatar.
"Saudi is the mother and father of political Islam, it is based on political Islam," said Khoshaggi. "The only recipe to get the Iranians out of Syria – it's not Trump or anyone else – is thanks to the support of the Syrian revolution. … L & # Saudi Arabia must resume its support for the Syrian revolution and its partnership with Turkey.
Eight days later, on October 2, he disappeared while he was going to the Istanbul consulate to write documents in order to marry his Turkish bride. The consulate insists that the author left his premises alive, in contradiction with the Turkish authorities.
Before his disappearance, Khoshaggi lived for a year in the United States in voluntary exile, after fleeing the kingdom in the middle of a repression against intellectuals and activists who criticized the policies of Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman.
"From now on, I would say that Mohammed bin Salman is acting like Putin, he imposes a very selective justice," wrote Khashoggi in the Post last year after fleeing the kingdom, fearing to return home.
He described "dramatic" scenes of arrest of critics of the government accused of receiving funding from Qatar. Among them was a friend of Khashoggi who had just returned from a trip to the United States as part of a Saudi official delegation.
"It's how quickly breathtaking you can lose favor with Saudi Arabia," he wrote.
[ad_2]Source link
