RIYADH (Dispatches) – Saudi Crown Prince
Mohammed bin Salman boasted that he could kill Saudi King Abdullah with a poison ring, a former top Saudi intelligence official told CBS’s 60 Minutes program on Sunday.
Saad al-Jabri said Bin Salman told him and Jabri’s boss, Interior Minister Mohammed bin Nayef, in 2014 that he could assassinate the sitting king to clear the throne for his father, King Salman.
“It is enough for me just to shake hands with him and he will be done,” Jabri said the young prince told the two.
MBS’s father, King Salman bin Abdulaziz, assumed power following the death of King Abdullah in 2015.
Al-Jabri, who fled to Canada in 2017 after MBS gained power, worked for a long time under former crown prince and interior minister, Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, an elder cousin and former rival of bin Salman.
Last year, al-Jabri filed a federal lawsuit in Washington alleging that MBS sent an assassination squad to Canada to kill him, weeks after the murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Earlier this year, he said MBS directed agents to embark on a second assassination mission against him after the first one failed two years ago.
Khashoggi, a former advocate of the Saudi royal court who later became a critic, was killed in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2, 2018, after he entered the premises to collect documents for his planned wedding to his Turkish fiancée Hatice Cengiz.
According to Turkish officials, Khashoggi was killed and his body was cut into pieces by a 15-man Saudi squad inside the consulate.
Al-Jabri also told CBS that bin Salman wants him dead because the crown prince “fears my information”, adding “I expect to be killed one day because this guy will not rest off until he sees me dead.”
In recent months, he has asserted that MBS is holding his children hostage in the kingdom to lure him back. According to human rights watchdogs, Saudi authorities have also detained some 40 other al-Jabri family members and associates.
According to the Saudi intelligence official’s lawsuit filed in August 2020, “There is virtually no one (MBS) wants dead more than Dr. Saad.”
Ever since bin Salman became Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler in 2017, the kingdom has arrested dozens of activists, bloggers, intellectuals and others perceived as political opponents, showing almost zero tolerance for dissent even in the face of international condemnations.
Muslim scholars have been executed, women’s rights campaigners have been put behind bars and tortured, and freedom of expression and association continue to be denied in the kingdom.
Al-Jabri warned that bin Salman has “no empathy,” and poses a threat to the people of Saudi Arabia, Americans, and the rest of the world.
“I have to speak out. I am appealing to the American people and to the American administration to help me to release those children and to restore their life,” he said in the interview, his first since leaving the kingdom.