Turkey will continue its efforts to shed light on the Khashoggi murder – Erdogan
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The killing of Saudi columnist Jamal Khashoggi has posed “a serious threat to the international order”, according to Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
A year after Khashoggi was killed inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Erdogan said the murder “was arguably the most influential and controversial incident of the 21st century”.
Erdogan added that the 15-member assassination squad that murdered Khashoggi inside Saudi Arabia’s Consulate in Istanbul and chopped his body into pieces served the interests of a shadow state within the kingdom’s government — not the Saudi state or people.
Had we believed otherwise, this atrocity would have indeed been treated like a bilateral problem. However, we continue to see what happened as a question of justice rather than politics, and maintain that national and international courts alone can deliver justice.
“That, one year on, the international community still knows very little about what happened is a serious source of concern. Whether all aspects of the Saudi journalist’s death will ever come to light will determine what kind of world our children live in,” Erdogan wrote in an opinion article published by the Washington Post on Sunday.
In the wake of Khashoggi’s demise, my administration adopted a policy of transparency. Over the past year, Turkey’s intelligence and law enforcement agencies, along with diplomats and prosecutors, cooperated closely with their counterparts and took steps to keep national and international audiences informed.
Turkish authorities shared their findings with Saudi Arabia as well as other countries, including the United States, Russia, Germany, France and the United Kingdom. We have also cooperated with the international investigation led by Agnes Callamard, the U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions.
