United Nations voices ‘serious concern’ over missing Saudi journalist

Khashoggi has not been seen since entering the consulate last week.

Meanwhile, Turkish authorities are scouring motorway camera footage in the hopes of finding a black van they suspect carried Khashoggi’s body out of the consulate.

The Turkish Foreign Ministry reported on Tuesday that Saudi Arabia has granted a request to allow Turkish investigators into the Istanbul consulate. “If he’s in Saudi Arabia, I would know that”.

President Trump has said he’ll talk to Saudi Arabian officials about the missing journalist at some point. He had been living since past year in the United States, in self-imposed exile, in part due to the rise of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who has shown little tolerance for criticism.

In March, the Senate narrowly failed in a bid to restrict USA support for Saudi Arabia’s campaign in Yemen over rights concerns.

“What we do care about is Jamal’s wellbeing, and revealing the truth about what occurred”.

It was the second time in two days that the ambassador had been questioned by the Foreign Office about what the Saudi royal family may know about Khashoggi’s disappearance. His columns had appeared in the Washington Post. A Saudi-led coalition has been at war with Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthi rebels since March 2015.

News agency Anadolu later reported that a private plane that had arrived from Saudi Arabia at Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport was searched last Tuesday, the day Khashoggi was last seen. The kingdom has a long history of abducting critics from overseas, and MBS has doubled down on such intimidation. It says seven were imprisoned there last year and nine this year.

Saudis are, perhaps, trying to flawless their excellence in furtherance of their plans and the world must expect more covert operations by Saudi Arabia in a not-so-distant future with Iran as its primary target. There are some pretty bad stories going around. That’s not good enough. “Then President Trump can respond”, Rogan advised. Among other things, as MBS told Bloomberg, the visit prompted Riyadh to commit to buying more than 60 percent of its weapons in the next decade from Washington. But he tempered his comments, saying: “Hopefully that will sort itself out”. Such gestures forge stronger economic and strategic ties.

Trump has repeatedly lashed out at the media, calling it the “enemy of the people”, and has raised human rights prominently only when pressuring USA antagonists such as Iran and China.

Longtime US Middle East negotiator Aaron David Miller tweeted that “by failing to call MBS out on anything, particularly repression at home, the Trump administration has emboldened him and given him a sense he can do anything”.

Embassy officials took the phone and handed it to Saudi intelligence officials, the source said.

Khashoggi was one journalist who chose to “report the reality”.

He said dozens of people had been detained in an apparent crackdown on dissidents under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who has been pioneering an ambitious economic and social reform program in the country.

Prince Mohammed had sought to cultivate in the West the image of a reformer by reducing the powers of the religious police, agreeing to the reopening of cinemas, the organisation of concerts and the entry of women into sports stadiums.

While living in Saudi Arabia, Khashoggi was told to stop writing or posting on Twitter, where he has more than 1.6 million followers.

Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt has met ambassador Prince Mohammed bin Nawaf Al Saud to “seek answers”, a day after Downing Street said the United Kingdom was “working urgently” to establish the facts behind the disappearance. I anxious about my family. “We Saudis deserve better”, he wrote.