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On Wednesday, the leader of Italia Viva, Matteo Renzi, spoke again about his relationship with the powerful crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, after the controversy last January for having participated with him in a conference organized by a controlled think tank. by the Saudi monarchy.
In addition to being the de facto leader of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman is known for ruling with extremely authoritarian methods and is considered by some intelligence agencies and various investigations as the instigator of the murder of the journalist of the Washington Post Jamal Khashoggi, killed on October 3, 2018 at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey.
Interviewed by some journalists outside the Senate, Renzi first defended the option of participating in the January conference organized by the think tank FII Institute, chaired by Yasir al Rumayyan, the head of the Saudi sovereign wealth fund. He then spoke of his relationship with Mohammed bin Salman, saying to call him “my friend”:
I call “my friend” a person I have known for years and who is a friend of mine.
Speaking of Khashoggi’s assassination, Renzi argued that there is no evidence that bin Salman was behind the assassination, and that even Joe Biden’s US administration would not believe it, because otherwise it would have imposed sanctions on Saudi Arabia. However, the situation is a bit more complex than that, and it is not true that the United States did not in any way recognize bin Salman as the instigator of the Khashoggi assassination.
In late February, the US government released the full version of a 2018 intelligence report on Khashoggi’s death. The report, prepared by the CIA, the US foreign intelligence agency, accused Mohammed bin Salman of being the instigator of the assassination.
Excerpts from the report had first been made public in November 2018, but then-President Donald Trump, who had made Saudi Arabia a key ally of the United States, had denied its veracity and prohibited its full publication. Trump’s election had been widely criticized, not least because it is extremely unusual for a president to publicly deny his intelligence agencies agreeing with a foreign leader.
After the report was released in February, the Biden government still approved visa restrictions for several Saudi officials, albeit not bin Salman’s, showing that it wanted to maintain friendly relations with the country. From his first weeks in office, however, it was clear that Biden’s approach to Saudi Arabia would be different from that adopted by Trump: for example, Biden has already announced his intention to stop the sale of some weapons to the Saudis and to anyone else. Support the ally longer in its war against the Houthi rebels in Yemen.
The CIA report is not the only document accusing bin Salman of being the instigator of the assassination. Following Khashoggi’s death, the UN conducted an investigation that ended in June 2019: According to the UN Special Rapporteur for Extrajudicial Executions, Agnes Callamard, there is “credible evidence” of the individual responsibility of senior Saudi officials, and also from the Saudi crown prince. Mohammed bin Salman.
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