By Ben Kerrigan-
The U.S government has rejected conclusions by the CIA that the Crown Prince, also known as MBS, ordered the killing of Khashoggi has not been accepted by the U.S administration.
Before leaving on his trip, Trump also said Saudi Arabia was “a truly spectacular ally in terms of jobs and economic development”.
“I have to take a lot of things into consideration” when deciding what measures to take against the kingdom, he said. Trump has resisted calls to cut off arms sales to the kingdom and has been reluctant to antagonize the Saudi rulers. Trump considers the Saudis vital allies in his Middle East agenda.
“The claims in this purported assessment are false. We have and continue to hear various theories without seeing the primary basis for these speculations,” a spokesperson for the Saudi Embassy in Washington said in a statement Friday. U.S President Donald Trump says his administration’s report will include information on ‘who did it’.
U.S President Donald Trump has said that his administration will release a full report in two days about the killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Trump told reporters on Saturday that the report will include information on “who did it”.
“We’ll be having a very full report over the next two days, probably Monday or Tuesday,” he said.
Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist and a critic of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, was murdered at the kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul on October 2 after he went there to obtain marriage documents. Turkish and Saudi authorities say Khashoggi was killed inside the consulate by a team from the kingdom, but they disagree on whether the murder was premeditated.
Other U.S officials close to the case have called for caution. They say that whilst it is likely that MBS was involved in the death, questions remain about the role he played. The Saudi Arabian Government have been under increasing suspicion ever since their narrative about the killing changed, and Turkish CCTV cameras and intelligence operation revealed that a hench group of the Saudi prince traveled to Turkey to corner and trap Kashoggi.
Shaalan al-Shaalan, the kingdom’s deputy public prosecutor, told a news conference in Riyadh that a 15-member squad was formed to bring Khashoggi to Saudi Arabia from Istanbul “by means of persuasion”. But after “talks with him failed” inside the consulate, Khashoggi was killed with “a large amount of a drug resulting in an overdose” and then dismembered, in the kingdom’s latest account of what happened.