French police Tuesday arrested at Paris’s main airport a suspected member of the team that murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018 outside the kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul, sources said.
Khalid Alotaibi, 33, was detained by border police on the basis of an arrest warrant issued by Turkey just before taking a flight to Riyadh from Charles de Gaulle airport, judicial and airport sources said. He is due to appear before prosecutors on Wednesday.
In 2020, a Turkish court began trying 20 suspects in the murder of Jamal Khashoggi in absentia, including two former advisers to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Later that year, Turkish authorities arrested six more Saudi suspects in the death, but no Saudi official has ever faced punishment in Turkey for the incident.
Five death sentences were overturned by a Saudi court in September 2020 after a closed-door trial, and they were instead sentenced to 20 years in jail.
On the 2nd of October 2018, Khashoggi, a renowned Saudi who lived in self-exile in the United States and wrote for The Washington Post, went to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to file paperwork to marry his Turkish girlfriend.
