Some members of the Saudi hit team that killed Saudi writer Jamal Khashoggi in his country’s consulate in the Turkish city of Istanbul received training in the United States, according to a columnist at the Washington Post.
Khashoggi, a critic of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), entered the building on October 2, 2018, to obtain documents necessary for his forthcoming marriage. He was killed inside the consulate by a team of Saudi operatives in what has been described as a “premeditated murder”.
His body is yet to be found.
According to the reporting by Washington Post’s David Ignatius, which included interviews with more than a dozen US and Saudi sources who requested anonymity, some of the special-operations training that members of the hit team received in the US might have been conducted by Tier 1 Group, an Arkansas-based company.
The training, part of a wider intelligence and defence partnership between the US and Saudi Arabia, was conducted under a State Department licence, said the Post, for which Khashoggi was a columnist. It has not resumed since.
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