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A court in Saudi Arabia sentenced five accused of killing anti-government journalist Jamal Kashqji to 20 years in prison.
The Saudi state broadcaster reported on the 7th (local time) that the Saudi Supreme Court sentenced five people who were brought to trial for murder and other charges of 20 years in prison and three to seven to 10 years in prison. The five people sentenced to 20 years in prison were sentenced to death in a trial in December last year, but the sentence was commuted in May this year after Kashukji’s bereaved family appealed to the court not to carry out the sentence of death for religious tolerance, the court said.
Kashqji, 59, who lived in the United States and contributed a column critical of the Saudi royal family to the Washington Post, was brutally murdered after visiting the Saudi Consulate General in Istanbul, Turkey, in October 2018. Still Kashqji’s body has not been found.
After Kashqji’s assassination, suspicions arose that the case was behind the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Muhammad Binsalman, but the Saudi government denied it. Since then, the UN special rapporteur has investigated the case as a detailed planned assassination in which all the secret agents of the Saudi government consulate are mobilized and has only pointed to the murder behind it. Western intelligence authorities also discovered that Binsalman ordered the assassination.
Saudi prosecutors charged 11 suspects involved in the Kashukji murder in late 2018. Of them, five people accused of injecting drugs and committing suicide were sentenced to 20 years in prison. Three of the remaining six were sentenced to prison for helping cover up the case, and the other three were found innocent of insufficient evidence in a trial in December last year, and are known to be close associates of Binsalman. The Saudi court ruled that “this case was not planned, but was an accidental murder.”
In the case of the Kashqji murder, a trial is under way against 20 defendants in Turkish courts. Among them was Saud Al Qahtani, a close friend who was the chief aide to Prince Binsalman, who was not even prosecuted in the Saudi courts.
Public opinion diverged on the court’s decision to commute the sentence. According to the Arab media Al Jazeera, some received the ruling as the end of one of the most difficult political cases facing Saudi Arabia. However, Al Jazeera said that Kashukji’s family’s request for commutation was due to threats and that there were many opposing public opinions that the trial was fabricated. “Today’s ruling in Saudi Arabia is an absolute ridicule of justice,” Kashukji’s fiancee said on social media.
