RIYADH (Middle East Eye) – Saudi Arabia is pressuring Turkey to close two court actions over the murder of Jamal Khashoggi in the kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul, three sources with knowledge of negotiations have told Middle East Eye.
With Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan expected to visit Riyadh in the coming weeks, three-and-a-half years after Saudi Arabia imposed a boycott on Turkish goods, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is attempting to use the visit as leverage to get a definitive end to the Khashoggi affair.
“For MBS, it’s all about Khashoggi. He is obsessed by it. It’s personal. He blames Erdogan personally for getting America involved and for not closing the affair down within the first few days,” one source with knowledge of the negotiations told MEE, using a common nickname for the de facto Saudi leader.
Turkey has already said it will transfer the case to Saudi judicial authorities, whose prosecution of Khashoggi’s alleged killers has been widely declared a sham.
Last week, a Turkish prosecutor asked an Istanbul court to stop proceedings against the alleged killers, citing a lack of progress in apprehending the suspects, non-enforcement of Interpol red notices, and the absence of testimonies from suspects.
In December, Turkish prosecutors came close to catching a man they had reason to believe was one of Mohammed bin Salman’s bodyguards and who was part of the murder team when he appeared in France.
A source told MEE that after heavy and persistent pressure from Turkish intelligence officials on their reluctant French counterparts a man whose passport was identical to the one used by Khaled Aedh al-Otaibi was arrested.
A 2019 UN report on the murder found that Otaibi, a member of the Saudi Royal Guard, was inside the Saudi consulate in Turkey during the October 2018 killing. He was seen accompanying Mohammed bin Salman during a trip to the United States in 2017, the report said.
The Saudi was released after the chief prosecutor in Paris ruled that the international arrest warrant for the 18 members of the kill squad used in the murder was “not applicable to him”. The Saudis claimed it was a case of mistaken identity.
The court in Istanbul is due to rule on shutting down legal proceedings in Turkey on Thursday.
However, there remains a second lawsuit in a U.S. federal court. This is filed by Khashoggi’s fiancee, Hatice Cengiz, and the U.S.-based advocacy group Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), which Khashoggi established and ran before his death.
This lawsuit, Turkish officials argue, is beyond their reach.
“Turkey is withdrawing the Khashoggi case in Istanbul and it is a legal decision,” one Turkish official told MEE, stressing that Ankara has no control over the U.S. case and has not discussed or negotiated over cases outside Turkey with Saudi authorities.
“Turkey doesn’t have any purview over the foreign court cases against the Saudi crown prince,” he added.
“It is solely within Hatice Cengiz’s powers whether to pursue those cases. However, many people, including Khashoggi family members, have been pressuring Cengiz to drop all cases. I wouldn’t be surprised if she did that. But she could also get more adamant on pressing on. It is up to her.”