Washington: The murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi and the fiancee of a human rights organization he founded filed a lawsuit in a US court on Tuesday, accusing the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia of ordering him to be killed.
The civil lawsuit requested undetermined damages to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and designated more than 20 other Saudis as defendants. At the same time, the relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia has been complicated by issues such as the killing of Khashoggi in 2018, Riyadh’s human rights record, and its role in Yemen’s civil war.
The Saudi Embassy did not immediately respond to a request for comment on this lawsuit. The crown prince, known by his initials MbS, refused to order the killing of Khashoggi.
In a Washington Post column, Khashoggi criticized the policies of the crown prince, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, who was killed and dismembered at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. He went there to obtain the documents needed to marry the Turkish citizen Hatice Cengiz.
The American human rights organization, now Cengiz and Democracy in the Arab World (DawN), founded by Khashoggi, a legal resident of Virginia, filed a lawsuit in the District Court of the District of Columbia. It lists the assistants and officials of several crown princes convicted of murder in Saudi Arabia. The prosecution announced that the Saudi case was closed.
The lawsuit alleges that MbS, his co-defendants and others conducted a conspiracy after discovering his “plan to use DAWN as a platform to support democratic reforms and promote human rights” to “permanently silence Khashoggi” no later than the summer of 2018. Mr”. . “
A senior official of the former Saudi intelligence service filed a lawsuit in a US court in August. He accused the crown prince of sending a hit team to exile in Canada and killing him.
Both suits are based on a law that allows U.S. courts to file suits against foreign officials for allegations of torture or extrajudicial executions.
