When a journalist from the television network\u00a0ABC News questioned Donald Trump\u00a0 about Khashoggi\u2019s murder, the president called the journalist\u2019s outlet \u201cfake news,\u201d before dismissing US intelligence reports suggesting that MBS had orchestrated the operation, asserting that the crown prince knew \u201cnothing about the attack.\u201d He also described Jamal Khashoggi as \u201cextremely controversial,\u201d adding: \u201cA lot of people didn\u2019t like the gentleman you\u2019re talking about. Whether you like him or not, these things happen.\u201d For his part, MBS called the murder a \u201cbig mistake\u201d and claimed that Saudi Arabia had \u201ctaken all the appropriate steps\u201d to investigate.<\/p>\n
Yet\u00a0impunity persists<\/a>. The only real trial concerning the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi, who was killed on 2 October 2018 in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, T\u00fcrkiye, was held in Saudi Arabia, behind closed doors, and resulted\u00a0in eight convictions out of the eleven defendants.<\/a> The investigation concluded that \u201cthe killing was not premeditated\u201d and that \u201cthe decision was made on the spot,\u201d even though the circumstances of the crime indicated the contrary.\u00a0High-ranking officials<\/a>, both directly and indirectly implicated, were spared. Hopes for genuine justice were dashed in December 2022, when a US federal judge recognised MBS\u2019s diplomatic immunity, thereby blocking legal action in the United States.<\/p>\n Saudi Arabia among the most repressive countries for journalists<\/p>\n Despite MBS\u2019 promises of reform following Jamal Khashoggi\u2019s assassination, Saudi Arabia remains\u00a0one of the worst countries in the world for journalists<\/a>, according to the 2025 RSF World Press Freedom Index. To this day,\u00a019 reporters are imprisoned for their work<\/a>, and last June, journalist\u00a0Turki al-Jasser was\u00a0executed<\/a> by the Kingdom after being arbitrarily convicted for his social media posts. In 2021, RSF filed a criminal complaint with the German Public Prosecutor General targeting the Saudi Crown Prince and other high-ranking Saudi officials for crimes against humanity, as part of their widespread and systematic persecution of journalists, including the murder of Jamal Khashoggi and the arbitrary detention of 34 journalists.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When a journalist from the television network\u00a0ABC News questioned Donald Trump\u00a0 about Khashoggi\u2019s murder, the president called the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":302930,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,3,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":["post-302929","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-news","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302929","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=302929"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302929\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/302930"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=302929"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=302929"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=302929"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}