Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia has publicly claimed responsibility for the murder of journalist Jamal Khashojji. According to the news agency Reuters, Mohammed bin Salman has said that he takes responsibility for the murder of Khashojji by Saudi agents last year because it was carried out while he was there.
The Crown Prince said this in a PBS documentary going to air next week.
This is the first time Crown Prince Salman has publicly indicated that he is taking responsibility for the murder of journalist Jamal Khashojji at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul.
Governments of the Western countries and the CIA had said that the Saudi Crown Prince had ordered the assassination of Khashojji, but Saudi officials continued to deny that he had any role in it.
The news of this murder was in the news all over the world and the Saudi government was severely criticized for this.
The image of the Crown Prince was also shaken by the murder of Khashojji. The Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, the world's largest oil exporter, has not even visited the US or Europe after this massacre.
The Crown Prince said these things in the documentary going to air on October 1, before the completion of one year of Khushoji's murder.
He told PBS's Martin Smith, "It happened while I lived. I take full responsibility for it because it happened while I was there."
The documentary is titled 'The Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia'.
In the documentary, when Smith asked Mohammed bin Salman how the murder occurred without his knowledge, the Crown Prince said, "We are 20 million people. We have 3 million government employees."
Smith asked the Crown Prince whether the killers had used the government's private jet? To this, he said, "We have officers and ministers who look after the work and they are responsible people. They have the authority to do so."
Earlier, a Saudi official held others responsible for the murder of Jamal Khashojji.
The government lawyer had said that the then Deputy Intelligence Chief had ordered Khashoji to be repatriated, but failing to get him back, the chief negotiator ordered his assassination.
Initially, Khashojji had a good relationship with the royal family of Saudi Arabia but later he started criticizing him.
Meanwhile, a senior US administration official told Reuters in June that the Trump administration was clearly pressuring Riyadh to bring those responsible for the murder to justice.
There are secret hearings against 11 suspects from Saudi Arabia, whose pace is very slow. A UN report said that Prince Mohammed and other senior Saudi officials should also be investigated.
Khashojji was a journalist for the US newspaper Washington Post and was last seen on 2 October 2018 at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul.
According to reports, his body was sliced and sent out of the building and nothing was found.
At an investment conference in Riyadh a few weeks after the murder, the Crown Prince called it a heinous crime and tragic incident and promised to bring those responsible to justice.
Khashojji's fiancé Hattis Kengiz said at a ceremony outside a conference of world leaders in the United Nations that she had two questions with the Crown Prince. First, who ordered the murder of Khashojji and why?
Kengiz said, "By accepting this, he has separated himself from Jamal's murder."
She said, "He is saying that this happened under his supervision but it means that he was not involved in the crime. His statement is purely a political maneuver."
Earlier, a Turkish newspaper had published details of the recording of the last moments before the death of Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoji.
The pro-government newspaper 'Sabah' wrote that in the last moments of his life, Khashoji requested his killers not to shut their mouths. Khashojji had said that he had asthma and that silencing would cause him suffocation.
According to the newspaper, this tape of Khushoji's murder was received by the Turkish intelligence agency from the embassy itself last October.
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