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U.S. President says there will be ‘severe punishment’ if the missing journalist is found murdered
U.S. President Donald Trump has said Saudi Arabia could be behind the disappearance of journalist Jamal Khashoggi and warned that Washington would inflict “severe punishment” if he was found murdered. The Saudi critic has not been seen since he walked into the kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul on October 2, with Turkish officials accusing Riyadh of murdering him inside the diplomatic mission.
“We’re going to get to the bottom of it and there will be severe punishment,” Mr. Trump told CBS’s ‘60 Minutes’ programme, according to an extract of an interview that was released on Saturday.
“As of this moment, they deny it and they deny it vehemently. Could it be them? Yes,” Mr. Trump said in the interview, which was conducted on Thursday, when asked if Mr. Khashoggi was murdered by Saudi Arabia. Mr. Trump added that the matter was especially important “because this man was a reporter.” But when asked what options Mr. Trump would consider, the President said he was not keen to limit arms sales to the kingdom — a position he has previously voiced.
“Well, it depends on what the sanction is,” he said. “I’ll give you an example — they are ordering military equipment. Everybody in the world wanted that order. Russia wanted it, China wanted it, we wanted it. We got it, and we got all of it, every bit of it. He added, “I’ll tell you what I don’t want to do. Boeing, Lockheed, Raytheon, I don’t want to hurt jobs. I don’t want to lose an order like that. And you know what, there are other ways of punishing, to use a word that’s a pretty harsh word, but it’s true.”
Working group
Meanwhile, a Saudi delegation reached Turkey on Friday to take part in a working group on Mr. Khashoggi’s disappearance. The NTV channel said the delegation comprised 11 people and had inspected the consulate in Istanbul. Turkish and foreign media, who have been camped outside the consulate all week, noticed the motorcade arriving on Friday, but it had not been immediately clear who the Saudi personnel entering the consulate were. Riyadh has welcomed the creation of the working group, but Interior Minister Prince Abdel Aziz bin Saud bin Nayef slammed claims that Mr. Khashoggi was killed inside the consulate. He described it as “baseless allegations and lies”. The latest claims reported by the Turkish pro-government Sabah daily said that Mr. Khashoggi, while entering the consulate, had been wearing an Apple watch, which was synced with an iPhone left outside with his fiancee Hatice Cengiz. It said that the watch had recorded what happened inside the consulate and this was uploaded to his cloud, although Saudis sought to partially delete it. There was no official confirmation of the report.
Source : https://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-international/khashoggi-case-trump-warns-saudi/article25217778.ece
