CIA concludes Saudi crown prince ordered Jamal Khashoggi's death, sources say

(CNN)The CIA has concluded that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman personally ordered the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, despite the Saudi government's denials that the de facto ruler was involved, according to a senior US official and a source familiar with the matter.

The senior US official told CNN on Friday the conclusion is based on a recording provided by the Turkish government and other evidence, including American intelligence.

The sources told CNN that the CIA based its assessment on available intelligence, as opposed to any specific smoking gun-type of evidence.

Investigators also believe an operation such as the one that ended in Khashoggi's death would not have happened without bin Salman's knowledge given his control of the government, the senior US official said.

A Saudi Embassy spokeswoman said in a statement that "the claims in this purported assessment are false. We have and continue to hear various theories without seeing the primary basis for these speculations."

The Washington Post was first to report on the CIA's assessment.

According to the Post, US officials have high confidence in the CIA's assessment.

President Donald Trump said Saturday morning that he had not yet been briefed on the CIA's assessment, but planned to speak with the agency and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo during his flight to California.

"As of this moment, we were told that (bin Salman) did not play a role," Trump told reporters at the White House before boarding Air Force One. "We're going to have to find out what they have to say."

The President, though, called Saudi Arabia a "spectacular ally."

"We also have a great ally in Saudi Arabia. They give us a lot of jobs, they give us a lot of business, a lot of economic development," Trump told reporters Saturday, later adding that Saudi Arabia has been "a truly spectacular ally in terms of jobs and economic development."

A spokesman for the CIA declined to comment to the Post. The Saudi government has denied bin Salman's involvement in Khashoggi's death.

Vice President Mike Pence said the United States would hold all involved with Khashoggi's murder to account. He also said he wanted to preserve the strong relationship with Saudi Arabia amid the murder investigation.

"The murder of Jamal Khashoggi was an atrocity. It was also an affront to a free and independent press and the United States is determined to hold all of those accountable who are responsible for that murder," Pence said early Saturday morning while in Papua New Guinea on a foreign trip.

Khashoggi, a former Saudi royal insider who became a critic of the country's government, went missing in October after he visited the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to obtain papers for his upcoming marriage. The Saudi government offered changing explanations for Khashoggi's disappearance.

Included in the US intelligence analyzed by the CIA was a phone call the prince's brother Khalid bin Salman made to Khashoggi, encouraging the journalist to make the trip to the consulate to get the documents, according to the Post. Sources told the Post that Khalid made the call at his brother's command.

Khalid denied the Post's reporting, saying on Twitter that he had never spoken to Khashoggi by phone.

"I never talked to him by phone and certainly never suggested he go to Turkey for any reason. I ask the US government to release any information regarding this claim," Khalid said.

He said the last contact he'd had with Khashoggi was via text in October 2017.

Fatimah Baeshen, a spokeswoman for the Saudi Embassy in Washington, told the Post that Khalid, who is the Saudi ambassador to the US, and Khashoggi never discussed "anything related to going to Turkey."The CIA also examined an audio recording from inside the Saudi consulate provided by Turkey and a phone call placed from inside the consulate after Khashoggi was killed, according to the Post.

Maher Mutreb, an alleged member of the Saudi hit team and a security official for the crown prince, placed the phone call to a top aide for bin Salman informing the aide that the job had been done, people familiar with the call told the newspaper.

The CIA does not know the location of Khashoggi's remains, according to the Post.

The Trump administration on Thursday imposed penalties on 17 individuals over their alleged roles in the killing of Khashoggi. Khashoggi's assassination has created a crisis for the Trump administration and drawn attention to President Donald Trump's business ties to Saudi Arabia and the relationship between bin Salman and Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner.

Earlier Thursday, the Saudi Public Prosecutor's Office said 11 people had been charged for their involvement in the death of Khashoggi, adding that five are facing capital punishment for being directly involved in "ordering and executing the crime."

Khashoggi was killed following "a fight and a quarrel" at the Saudi consulate, the prosecutor's office claimed. Prosecutors said Khashoggi was tied up and injected with an overdose of a sedative that killed him. Then, according to prosecutors, his body was dismembered and removed from the consulate by five people.

CNN's Donna Borak, Nicole Gaouette, Sarah El Sirgany, Nada Altaher, Bianca Britton and Jennifer Hauser contributed to this report.

Read More

Renaming spree: Erasing Muslim heritage in India

Inadequacies of the Modi government may have left no option but play the Hindu card

The chief minister of the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh (UP), Yogi Adityanath, has lived up to his reputation as a Hindutva (Hindu nationalism) hawk. His attitude has not mellowed after ascending to power. Instead, he has used his political clout to state that Hindu symbols and signs are of overriding importance. Hence, the concept of a huge statue of Rama on the banks of the Saryu, the wholehearted support to the Ram temple movement and the erasure of Muslim names of towns.

Starting with the renaming of the Mughal Sarai railway junction, familiar to countless travellers, after a person who is little known outside the Hindutva camp — Deen Dayal Upadhyay — the Adityanath government has been energetically changing the names of other places as well. These include Allahabad, which has become Prayagraj, Faizabad is now Ayodhya, and Muzaffarnagar, which may soon be called Laxmi Nagar if the government accepts the suggestion by Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) member of legislature Sangeet Som, who had called the Taj Mahal a “blot” on Indian culture.

Encouraged by Adityanath, Gujarat Chief Minister Vijay Rupani has suggested the name Karnavati for Ahmedabad. Not to be left behind, the BJP’s ally, Shiv Sena, has sought a time-frame for renaming Aurangabad and Osmanabad. Hyderabad too is under the Hindutva scanner: The BJP has said that if it wins the assembly elections in Telangana, it will rename the city Bhagyanagar.

Although cities have been renamed in the past — Chennai for Madras, Mumbai for Bombay, Kolkata for Calcutta — the idea was generally to revive an old name such as the association of Madras/Chennai with a 16th-century ruler, Chennappa Naicker. Or to pay homage to a local deity, Mumbadevi, as in the case of Bombay. Or to bring a name phonetically close to the way it is locally pronounced like Kolkata. But rarely has a city been renamed to highlight a Hindu name and snub Muslims.

True, the names of roads and localities (such as Clive Street or Connaught Place) associated with the British rulers were changed. But that was to sever a colonial connection although the names of “friendly” foreigners were retained, as in the case of the Corbett National Park. But the saffron brotherhood’s drive is solely motivated by a desire to erase all signs of Muslim heritage, presumably because of the belief that the community does not — or at least should not — have any place in the country. Hence, BJP MP Vinay Katiyar’s advice to Muslims living in India to go to Pakistan or Bangladesh.

The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the BJP hold the view that the Mughals and the Muslim rulers before them, as well as their co-religionists today, are aliens, although the Mughals and the others made India their home unlike the British. Although RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat argued at a conclave in Delhi earlier this year that Hindutva is incomplete without Muslims — thereby acknowledging the country’s multi-religious identity — Adityanath’s acts show that the case for accommodation is not accepted by the Hindutva hawks.

To them, the replacement of the signs of Muslim presence is an expression of Hindu pride just as the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992 and the Gujarat riots of 2002 were cited as instances of Hindu “awakening”. Multicultural tenets are anathema to the Hindutva brigade as they militate against the “one nation, one people, one culture” ideals of a Hindu Rashtra, where the minorities will be second class citizens. The Hindus-only tunnel-vision of the hardliners ignores the fact that India is the birthplace of four religions — Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism and Jainism — and the home of the followers of three other faiths — Islam, Christianity and Zoroastrianism, not to mention the animism of the tribals.

The urgency to erase Muslim signs in the twilight years of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government may be due to the apprehension that the inadequacies of the government have left it with no option but to play the Hindu card with greater fervour. The tactic has only brought to the fore the long-standing anti-minority outlook of the Sangh Parivar (family). It is also evident that the occasional homilies of the RSS bigwigs in favour of accommodating Muslims and the lectures favouring pluralism have had little effect.

The humiliating wiping out of little bits of India’s past with their Muslim associations can only widen the gulf between the Hindus and the country’s largest minority community, even if Muslims understand the crass political intent of the provocative acts, which have the support of only saffron outfits and not of Hindus in general.

For the political saffronites, it has been a step-by-step process of rewriting history. When Murli Manohar Joshi was the Union human resources development minister, the Middle Ages were presented as a time of constant conflict between Hindus and the “invaders”. The latest attempt is to obliterate the concept of a composite culture or the Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb (culture), as it is known in Uttar Pradesh.

— IANS

Amulya Ganguli is a political analyst in India.

Read More