Jamal Khashoggi (13 October 1958-2 October 2018) was a Saudi Arabian journalist, author, and editor of the newspaper al-Watan. A voice of the progressive movement in his country, he was murdered at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey on the orders of Prince Mohammad bin Salman.
Biography[]
Jamal Khashoggi was born in Medina, Saudi Arabia in 1958, the grandson of Turkish physician Muhammed Halit Kasikci; his grandmother was Arab, and his uncle also claimed that their grandfather had Jewish ancestry. He became involved in journalism during the 1980s, and he became acquainted with Osama Bin Laden during the Soviet-Afghan War in the 1980s and 1990s. The two of them became close, and Saudi intelligence services sought Khashoggi to convince Bin Laden to make a compromise with the House of Saud. In 1997, Khashoggi was surprised to see Bin Laden's radicalization, and he dissociated himself from Bin Laden following the 9/11 attacks. In 2003, he became editor-in-chief of al-Watan, and he turned it into a platform for progressives. In September 2017, he went into self-imposed exile in Turkey after he had been banned from Twitter by the Saudi government, and he criticized the Saudi government, King Salman, and Prince Mohammad bin Salman, as well as their military intervention in the Yemeni Civil War. Khashoggi also became a Washington Post journalist in September 2017, and the Saudi government used an army of Twitter trolls to harass him. On 2 October 2018, Khashoggi entered the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul to obtain documents related to his planned marriage, but a hit squad of fifteen Saudis accosted Khashoggi as he entered the consulate, strangled him to death, and dismembered with a bonesaw. His body parts were burned on the same day as an unusual backyard barbecue at the consulate, raising the suspicions of the consulate's neighbors. While Saudi Arabia initially claimed that he had been alive and had exited the embassy, it was later revealed that the person wearing his clothing was an impostor, and that Khashoggi had, in fact, been murdered.