A Saudi man arrested in connection with the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi has been released after prosecutors said he was a victim of mistaken identity.
Khalid Alotaibi was arrested on Tuesday at an airport in Paris after his passport triggered an alert based on an international arrest warrant.
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“Extensive checks on the identity of this person showed that the warrant did not apply to him,” France’s general prosecutor’s office said.
A 33-year-old Saudi citizen with the same name and age as the arrested man was named in the UN report on the murder of Khashoggi, and in a list of individuals sanctioned by the US. He is believed to be one of the 26-member death squad accused by Turkey for having a hand in the gruesome murder of the former Washington Post journalist in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October 2018.
Once a regime insider who turned into one of the leading critics of Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman (known as MBS), Khashoggi was killed and cut to pieces using a bone saw after he visited the Saudi consulate for paperwork relating to a marriage licence. His body was never found, and at first, the Saudi government denied any wrongdoing, but later admitted he had been killed in a “rogue operation.”
In 2019, Saudi authorities claimed that a court has sentenced eight unnamed suspects behind closed doors, with five sentenced to death. The death sentences were later converted to prison terms.
Despite consistent denials, Khashoggi’s murder greatly damaged the reputation of MBS, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia.
A period of isolation from Western leaders ended this week however, ironically with the visit of French President Emmanuel Macron in Saudi Arabia.
“We talked about absolutely everything, without any taboos, and we were obviously able to bring up the question of human rights,” Macron told reporters on Saturday from Riyadh.
Agnès Callamard, the secretary-general of Amnesty International, had written in a tweet that Tuesday’s arrest “could be a major breakthrough in the quest for justice”.
Saudi Arabia’s embassy in Paris said: “The person arrested has nothing to do with the case in question.”
