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Saudi Arabia sent Jamal Khashoggi look-alike to build false trail in Istanbul, Saudi official says
The use of a “body double” suggests a premeditated plan to make Khashoggi disappear, through death or abduction, and to cover it up — possibly contradicting Saudi insistence that his death was the accidental result of an altercation.
Saudi Arabia sent to Istanbul a man who looked like dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi and then dispatched the look-alike in Khashoggi’s clothes to walk around the city and create a misleading trail of surveillance camera images, a Saudi official confirmed Monday.
A Turkish newspaper, Haberturk, reported Saturday that someone who looked like Khashoggi left the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul on October 2, the day the dissident was killed inside the building. On Monday, CNN showed images, leaked by Turkish authorities, that appear to show that man, one of 15 Saudis sent to Istanbul on the day Khashoggi disappeared, strolling around Istanbul wearing Khashoggi’s clothes.
The use of a “body double” suggests a premeditated plan to make Khashoggi disappear, through death or abduction, and to cover it up — possibly contradicting Saudi insistence that his death was the accidental result of an altercation. Turkish officials have said that the Saudi team, who left Turkey hours after they arrived, was sent to Istanbul to kill Khashoggi.
After weeks of insisting that Khashoggi, a Saudi who lived in the United States and who wrote columns for The Washington Post, had left the consulate alive and well, the Saudi government acknowledged Friday that he had been killed there. The case has caused an international uproar.
On Sunday, the Saudi foreign minister, Adel al-Jubeir, gave the first public, high-level acknowledgment that there had been a cover-up, but he and other officials continue to say that the death was an accident and that it was not ordered by the royal family. Western intelligence officials have said that the operation was most likely directed by Saudi Arabia’s powerful crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, and several members of the team that flew to Istanbul have ties to him.
Khashoggi’s fiancée, Hatice Cengiz, has been placed under police protection, a Turkish official said Monday. The official said the measure had been taken not because of any specific threat but because Cengiz, who was to marry Khashoggi the day after he went to the Saudi Consulate, had been the target of online abuse.
On Sunday, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey said that he would soon reveal everything Turkey knows about the case.
