Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, has broken a three-week public silence over the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, describing the journalist’s murder as a “heinous crime that cannot be justified”.
Speaking in Riyadh at the Future Investment Initiative conference, nicknamed “Davos in the desert”, the prince said all culprits would be punished, and that “justice would prevail”. They were his first remarks since the global outcry over the killing on 2 October of the Washington Post columnist at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, an event that continues to reverberate around the region. Members of the prince’s security staff are among those named by Turkish authorities as having carried out the killing.
Bin Salman announced a restructuring of the kingdom’s national security agencies and said Saudi Arabia and Turkey would work together “to reach results”. “The incident that happened is very painful, for all Saudis … The incident is not justifiable,” he said. “They will not be able to divide us as long as there is a king called King Salman bin Abdulaziz and a crown prince named Mohammed bin Salman, and a president in Turkey named Erdoğan.”
