Khashoggi’s cheerful day with grisly end

As he strolled with his fiancee, Jamal Khashoggi had no way of knowing that the plane carrying his assassins had just landed.

Journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Journalist Jamal Khashoggi was cheerful as he walked with his fiancee towards the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, where he would be tortured and dismembered.

The two discussed their plans for the rest of the day. They would shop for appliances for their new home that afternoon before catching up with family and friends for dinner.

The dissident Saudi writer had no way of knowing that just before dawn on that day, October 2, a twin-engine Gulfstream IV plane carrying his assassins had landed at Istanbul airport from Saudi Arabia.

Among those on board was forensic doctor Salah al-Tubaigy, who trained for three months with the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine in Melbourne. The doctor was armed with a bone saw.

Also in the plane was Maher Abdulaziz Mutreb, who travels the world with the man who runs Saudi Arabia, crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, as a member of his security detail.

At 9.55am, Mutreb led some of the 15-member assassination squad into the Saudi consulate to lie in wait for Khashoggi. The Washington Post correspondent had a 1pm appointment to sign papers to finalise his divorce to clear the way to marry fiancee Hatice Cengiz.

“When we arrived at the consulate, he went right in,” Cengiz recalls. “He told me to alert the Turkish authorities if I did not hear from him soon. Had I known it would be the last time I would see Jamal, I would have rather entered the Saudi consulate myself.”

US intelligence knew that Salman wanted to lure Khashoggi — his staunchest critic in the Western media — back to Saudi Arabia and imprison him, because they had intercepted the plan months earlier.

But they could never have anticipated the horror that was about to unfold inside the ­embassy while the writer’s fiancee waited outside.

GRAPHIC: The Khashoggi killing

According to sickening audio and video seen by Turkish ­officials, Khashoggi was ushered immediately into the office of the Saudi consul, Mohammad al-Otaibi, where he was seized by the men. They beat him and then tried to interrogate him. In the minutes that followed, they drugged him and then reportedly chopped off some of his fingers.

“Do this outside, you will put me in trouble,” Otaibi told the killers, according to Turkish officials.

One of the assassination squad replied: “If you want to live when you come back to Arabia, shut up.”

Within seven horrific minutes, Khashoggi was dead and Saudi Arabia was about to confront its most serious diplomatic crisis in decades.

Tubaigy, who had observed autopsies while in Melbourne, then used his bone saw to behead the journalist and dismember him. He wore headphones to drown out the noise and suggested that others in the room also listen to music to avoid listening to the cutting of bones.

Less than two hours later, a convoy of vehicles was seen leaving the consulate for the nearby residence of the consul.

What happened to Khashoggi’s body remains a mystery but Turkish officials yesterday were focused on Istanbul’s Belgrad Forest and farmland in Yalova province, about 100km away.

Late that evening, two planes took the death squad back to Saudi Arabia. Their job was done.

Almost immediately, it became clear that Khashoggi had either been murdered or taken hostage.

Security vision at the consulate showed him walking in but never leaving. Within days, it was revealed that Turkey had obtained audio and video evidence — possibly through concealed bugs — that the journalist had died a gruesome death inside the consulate.

For the Trump White House, the news could not have been worse. Although Khashoggi was a Saudi citizen, he had been living in exile in Virginia for the past year and was a columnist with the Washington Post. He was a passionate advocate for greater freedoms in the Arab world and took aim at those in his homeland who had undermined such freedoms. At the top of his list was the crown prince.

“With young Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s rise to power, he promised an embrace of social and economic reform,” Khashoggi wrote in September last year. “He spoke of making our country more open and tolerant and promised that he would address the things that hold back our progress, such as the ban on women driving. But all I see now is the recent wave of arrests.”

Yet the White House had already adopted the crown prince as one of its favourites. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, saw the 33-year-old heir to the Saudi throne as the key to the future of US-Saudi relations.

Kushner argued that the Saudis were a vital ally against Iran in the region and would play a key role in any Middle East peace deal.

Donald Trump made Saudi Arabia his first overseas stop as President.

No one in the White House wanted to believe that the crown prince had ordered such an ugly assassination of a critic. The administration needed to buy time to formulate a response as outrage grew around the world at a pace that caught both the Saudis and the White House by surprise.

Business leaders such as Richard Branson began to vote with their feet, pulling out of a major Saudi investment conference next week and in some cases dropping investment plans in the kingdom. The Saudi stockmarket tumbled as many world leaders expressed outrage at Khashoggi’s murder.

Under pressure, Trump initially promised “severe punishment” for Saudi Arabia if it were found that the royal family had ordered the killing. But when both King Salman and the crown prince denied to Trump on the phone that they knew anything about the killing, the President’s demeanour changed.

No matter how improbable the Saudi claim may have been, it gave the White House an escape route from punitive sanctions. Trump backed the denial claims by offering the implausible theory that those who killed the journalist might have been “rogue” killers acting on their own.

During deliberations in the White House about how the US should respond, the President reportedly kept stressing the importance of the US-Saudi relationship above all else.

Trump said Saudi Arabia was a vital ally in his administration’s campaign to counter the malign influence of Iran in the region. He argued that if the US cut off arms sales, with deals worth $US110 billion ($154bn) in the pipeline, then the vacuum would be filled by China or Russia, costing US jobs.

And Trump pointed out that Khashoggi was a Saudi and not an American, the implication being that it was not worth imperilling such an important alliance to make a statement about human rights. By midweek, Trump was not in the mood to consider sanctions against the Saudis over Khashoggi. “We are not going to walk away from Saudi Arabia,” he said bluntly.

He compared the accusations against the crown prince to those against his Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. “Here we go again with, you know, you’re guilty until proven innocent. I don’t like that,” the President said.

At the same time, the link between the crown prince and the murder became stronger after it was revealed that at least 12 members of the 15-member hit squad were members of the Saudi security services or military.

The White House says it will wait until the outcome of the Saudi investigation into Khashoggi’s death before deciding whether to take action. But as things stand there appears to be little appetite to punish the crown prince for his probable role in the murder of his prominent critic.

To make matters more bizarre, one of the suspects in Khashoggi’s murder was yesterday reported to have died in a mysterious car accident, raising speculation that he was silenced.

On top of all this, Khashoggi’s voice appeared, like a voice from the grave, as the Washington Post published his final column written days before his death. The piece was a cry for more free expression across the Arab world and fewer authoritarian leaders such as the crown prince. “The Arab world was ripe with hope during the spring of 2011,” Khashoggi wrote. “Journalists, academics and the general population were brimming with expectations of a bright and free Arab society within their respective countries. These expectations were quickly shattered; these societies either fell back to the old status quo or faced even harsher conditions than before.”

Among his final words was an observation that turned out to be all too prescient. “Arab governments have been given free rein to continue silencing the media at an increasing rate,” he wrote.

Cameron Stewart is also US contributor for Sky News Australia