By
Jonathan Landay, WASHINGTON USA
The fiancée
of slain Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi and a human rights group that he
founded filed a lawsuit in a U.S. court on Tuesday with allegations that Saudi
Arabia’s crown prince ordered him killed.Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman
The civil lawsuit, which seeks
unspecified damages against Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, also named more
than 20 other Saudis as defendants. It coincides with complications in the
U.S.-Saudi relationship over the 2018 slaying of Khashoggi, Riyadh’s human
rights record, its role in Yemen’s civil war and other issues.
The Saudi embassy did not
immediately respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit. The crown prince -
known by his initials MbS - has denied ordering Khashoggi’s murder.
Khashoggi, who criticized the
policies of the crown prince, Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, in Washington Post
columns, 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), a U.S.-based human rights group founded by Khashoggi, a legal
resident of Virginia, filed the lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the District
of Columbia. It names several of the crown prince’s aides and officials who
were 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.”
A lawsuit was filed in August in
a U.S. court by a former top Saudi intelligence official who accused the 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 U.S. court actions against foreign officials over allegations of involvement in torture or extrajudicial killings. - Reuters
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