The fiance of slain Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi and a human rights group filed a lawsuit in a US court, they have filed allegations that Saudi Arabia’s crown prince ordered him killed and sues him.
The civil lawsuit seeks unspecified damages against Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. It also named more than 20 other Saudis as defendants. It coincides with complications in the US-Saudi relationship over the 2018 slaying of Khashoggi.
The Saudi embassy did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit, said Reuters. The crown prince Mohammad Bin Salman has denied ordering Khashoggi’s murder.
Khashoggi’s murder & the lawsuit
Khashoggi had criticized the policies of the crown prince, Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, in Washington Post columns for which he was made to ay the price and now his fiance blames and sues the crown prince for it. He was killed and dismembered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. He went there to obtain papers he needed to marry Hatice Cengiz, a Turkish citizen.
Cengiz and Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN) is a US-based human rights group which Khashoggi had founded. He was also a legal resident of Virginia. The human rights group filed the lawsuit in US District Court for the District of Columbia. It names several of the crown prince’s aides and officials. They were all convicted in Saudi Arabia of the murder. The prosecution declared the Saudi case closed.
The lawsuit charged that MbS, his co-defendants, and others carried out a plot to “permanently silence Mr. Khashoggi” no later than the summer of 2018 after discovering his “plans to utilize DAWN as a platform to espouse democratic reform and promote human rights.”
Meanwhile, a former top Saudi intelligence official had filed the lawsuit in August in a US court. Moreover, he accused the Saudi Crown Prince of sending a hit team to kill him in Canada, where he lives in exile.
Both lawsuits were brought under a law allowing US court actions against foreign officials over allegations of involvement in torture or extrajudicial killings.
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