As the circle tightens around Khashoggi's killers

Details about the operation carried out on Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul, and about the identities and activities of those who took part in this operation, are emerging day by day. It is also understood from what has emerged so far that many more details will emerge.

Our friend Kemal Öztürk, quite rightly, objects to the way the news about our valuable friend Khashoggi, who was treacherously and savagely killed, is being reported. He says that glossing over the identity of the person killed as "an opposition journalist," dwelling on excessive details of the murder, and the excessive interest in the manner and moment of the killing lead to ignoring the great personality behind the victim, that human situation and story.

After all, there is an extremely human story here. There is the anxious going of someone trying to carry out a marriage far from his own country to the consulate of his own country. There is a man who is a giant in his thought, his personality, his human relations, his courtesy, elegance and nobility.

An expert in politics with an extremely intelligent, intellectual, analytical mind, at the same time a man who knows the world, the region, Türkiye and the Saudi Arabian state very well, but all this knowledge and vision of this man is completely put out of action as he goes to pick up a simple document that his own country's consulate would give him in order to complete his own marriage process.

There is a trust he feels that his own country could never do this or anything like it to him, and in Türkiye at that. He had in fact already tested this trust four days earlier (on 28 September). That is why he goes to the second appointment even more at ease.

Let us pause here and take a look, if you like, at the scenarios developed over this event since the day of the incident... When I narrated this event in this way in a gathering, a sarcastic and know-it-all question from someone, "so what, is everything that simple?", made me feel just how far, when the very point that disturbs Öztürk is neglected more than necessary, it severs us from the realm of facts.

What this question tacitly assumed was this: States never do anything so simply, without calculation, without a plan, without strategy. Everything has been planned in advance, even long in advance. Had death not been written for him in this event, it would perhaps be thought that he too was part of the conspiracy.

Yet the excessive intelligence or strategic reason we attribute to states can sometimes be very detached from the facts. Facts can sometimes be much simpler than we suppose.

Those states may not even be aware of the image we draw in our heads of their behavior. That is why legends about states are of the "the sheikh does not fly, the disciple makes him fly" kind.

After all, states are run by people too, and they are also affected by those people's skills, sense of responsibility and seriousness. Moreover, sometimes states, especially big states, can have less than the capacity to organize of a much smaller group, or even of an individual. Those who know bureaucracy more or less will understand very well what we mean.

If you begin to narrate the event as "15 people coming in plain view and committing a murder," you see in the event only sloppiness and amateurishness. Yet probably many unsolved murders were not committed any other way. That no great trace that would reveal the sloppiness behind them, or clue that would make hot pursuit possible, had been left before makes it impossible for us to follow many other events today and lets us mythologize their perpetrators.

In this murder too, it is very clear that the critical name, or the person who made hot pursuit possible, is Khashoggi's fiancée Hatice Cengiz. Had Cengiz not been waiting for Khashoggi outside the consulate on the day of the event and not relayed, hot off the moment, the information that she could in no way see him come out, today we would probably be searching for where Khashoggi disappeared with Türkiye's intelligence ladle in the cauldron. The consulate would either never have come to mind, or even if it had, prolonging an investigation toward it would not have been very possible.

And then there are those conspiracy theories run with Agatha Christie minds: whoever the murder benefited most committed the murder. Starting from this, there are those who, because the one most harmed by this murder today is Saudi Arabia, conclude that this affair is a conspiracy against Saudi Arabia. The Saudi Arabian media, with this mindset, attacks whoever comes before it. Now it accuses Türkiye, now Qatar, now Iran.

We can understand the Saudi media, in the haste of defense not knowing what it is saying, giving credit to this reasoning, but there are also people in Türkiye who seriously try to reason on this matter merely by saying "nothing can be this simple."

So what? Did Qatar, Iran, Türkiye or the USA have 15 people of every level working under the command of the Saudi Arabian Crown Prince loaded onto two planes in the service of the Saudi Arabian Crown Prince and brought to the Saudi Arabian consulate targeting the hour Khashoggi was there? What kind of reasoning is this?

Of course there is a very simple fact that this reasoning, influenced by crime novels, neglects. If caught in the act, that is, if there is no gap regarding the explanation of the event, this logic not only does not work but also turns out quite improper.

Killers who hope to gain something would not undertake the murder at all if they knew they would be caught. When they are caught, they end up losing far, far more than they hoped to gain from the murder. In this case, let those who steal a role from Agatha Christie and enter into conspiracy analyses keep amusing themselves in their world of fantasy.

For the killers who entered this business hoping for great gain, the circle is tightening ever tighter. Their being caught is a matter of moments.

What they will lose when caught is beyond measure. The hands that stained themselves with Khashoggi's blood will be broken. They will curse the moment they thought of killing him.