Criticise the Saudis and you go home in pieces

Soldato
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Saudi journalist who is openly critical of the world's largest supporter and funder of international terrorism friendliest and most amiable supplier of oil walks into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul and just disappears. Coincidentally, a 15-man team turned up the same day and left later that day in diplomatic cars.

Turkish officials said Mr Khashoggi was killed on the premises and his body was then removed.

Investigators said a 15-person team arrived at the consulate on Tuesday, returning to Riyadh the same day.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-45775819

https://www.washingtonpost.com/worl...ffaf6d422aa_story.html?utm_term=.5a9784f17018
 
Caporegime
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Let's see what the Turks do about this. Not sure what they can do if consulates are considered sovereign soil?

The offer from the Saudis for the Turks to come and check it out makes me laugh. At least 5 of the dudes going in would have been on clean up duty :p.

Anyway if the journalist has come a cropper, he died whilst in the process of getting divorce papers so he could marry this person:

kZvhudf.jpg

Yeesh.
 

NVP

NVP

Soldato
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Meanwhile, on the heels of the bombshell initial reports on Saturday alleging that Khashoggi was murdered, Middle East Eye issued its own report based on sources close to the Turkish probe into the disappearance. The report claims the Saudi journalist was "brutally tortured, killed and cut into pieces" and his body removed from the consulate.

The Middle East Eye sources further say there is video tape evidence of the whole murder - a tape subsequently taken out of Turkey via return flight to Saudi Arabia.

The shocking allegations are detailed as follows:

"The initial assessment of the Turkish police is that Mr Khashoggi has been killed at the consulate of Saudi Arabia in Istanbul. We believe that the murder was premeditated and the body was subsequently moved out of the consulate," one of the sources, a Turkish official, said.

A senior Turkish police source told MEE that Khashoggi had been "brutally tortured, killed and cut into pieces. Everything was videotaped to prove the mission had been accomplished and the tape was taken out of the country".

The police said about 15 Saudis, including officials, came to Istanbul on two private flights on Tuesday and were at the consulate at the same time as the journalist. They left again the same day, police added, AFP reported.

We are about to see an explosion of heated diplomatic activity and claims and counterclaims after today's reports, but what is certain is that Jamal Khashoggi is still nowhere to be found


Video taped for proof or his personal collection !?


Think this will turn into a game changer for SA publicly, or get swept to the back of the news in a couple days?
 
Caporegime
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Video taped for proof or his personal collection !?

well it's not the first time one of these guys had a private collection of torture tapes

Half brother of the current ruler of Abu Dhabi - he shot at, beat, ran over with a car etc.. an Afghan gran dealer he thought had cheated him:


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Issa_bin_Zayed_Al_Nahyan

of course there was an outcry and a sham trial... which completely cleared him

Think this will turn into a game changer for SA publicly, or get swept to the back of the news in a couple days?

they'll just go for Russian style denials, the US/other western countries will grumble a bit at a diplomatic level and then it will probably get forgotten about

Saudi relations with Turkey will deteriorate further though

Both the UAE and Saudi also have princesses held hostage - both countries are heavily influenced by the really dumb aspects of Islam including the backwards attitudes towards women.
 
Soldato
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Diplomatic immunity doesn't really make you immune from the law. It definitely doesn't allow you to get away with murder.
 
Man of Honour
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Let's see what the Turks do about this. Not sure what they can do if consulates are considered sovereign soil? [..]

They're not entirely so. It's certainly not legal to kill someone in one even if it's sanctioned by the government represented by the consulate. There's a lot of slack, but it's not umlimited. A famous example here was the SAS attacking the Iranian embassy in the UK to free hostages - that didn't require permission from the Iranian government.

But nothing will get done about this, at least not openly. It will affect diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Turkey, but that'll be behind the scenes and will be smoothed over if it becomes convenient to do so. Besides, Erdogan can't sanely or even plausibly play the moral high ground on this because he's done the same thing many, many times.
 
Caporegime
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A famous example here was the SAS attacking the Iranian embassy in the UK to free hostages - that didn't require permission from the Iranian government.

Not so sure about that, IIRC one of the Iranian diplomats who had been held hostage managed to escape and requested the British government stage a rescue, that was what gave them the legal grounds to do so.
 
Soldato
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So Turkey has named some of the 15 man hit squad that flew in on a couple of Saudi diplomatic private jets and then after the deed flew to numerous countries on the same jets.

https://www.gulf-times.com/story/609075/Saudi-government-planned-Khashoggi-hit-NYT

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/10/world/middleeast/jamal-khashoggi-saudi-turkey.html

One appears to be Salah Muhammad al-Tubaigy, the chief of forensic evidence and an autopsy expert in the public security directorate of the Interior Ministry"
 
Soldato
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How about this as an alternative -

  • Journalist goes to Embassy after booking an appointment previously
  • He gets seized inside and held by a 7 man interrogation squad who had arrived earlier that day, specifically for him
  • During his interrogation he has a heart attack and dies
  • 1st squad poops their pants over an unexpected dead body in the consulate and decides to ask for help from Saudi
  • Saudi says "Oh ****!" then tells them to get rid of the body and scrambles a 2nd team to help remove any evidence
  • 1st squad then chops up the body in the embassy and removes the body/body-parts to a nearby diplomats home
  • 2nd squad arrive later that day with forensic/autopsy expert and sanitise the scene before leaving the country
  • 1st squad leave separately with the body parts
  • Only then do Saudis think about making a "cover story", hence it's rushed and poor narrative
So in that "story" here the death is accidental (not convinced on a "bone saw" yet) but rather than admitting he died during questioning and having an independent autopsy prove it was a heart attack (bad for Saudi in the short term with the press), they do what Saudi's tend to do in a crisis and panic (I know this from long experience), making the situation a thousand times worse for themselves.

For context, Saudis don't tend to be the most "free thinking" of people when in a crisis where they don't seem to be able to think of a abstract solution on the spot, instead sticking rigidly to a plan regardless that it has already collapsed. So putting them in a rapidly changing situation going from worse to worse makes their reactions look, to us at least, to be extremely amateur and ill thought-out, such as having the Crown Prince (MBS) get involved in the press saying "he left via the back-gate" - making MBS out to be a liar when it's proven otherwise and putting the whole Saudi government/Crown on the worlds Poop list now the evidence is mounting.
 
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