"Anything you say can be used against you"

"You do not have to speak, you have the right to remain silent, remember, anything you say can be used against you as evidence in court."

This is a line engraved in everyone's memory, one that the police remind even criminals caught red-handed in Hollywood films. Even if the convict has been caught red-handed, it gives him in a way an opportunity to defend himself, to clear himself out of a situation that seems hard to explain otherwise. In a way too, it ensures that, since an objective situation exists anyway and the data will be collected in the most impartial way and the requirements of justice will be fulfilled, the defendant does not sink himself further with unnecessary words.

In the Khashoggi murder there is a red-handed situation. There is a serial murder committed in a place belonging to the Saudi Arabian state, by people who could not act without exercising the highest-level powers of the state, again using all the resources of the state. But the Attorney General of Saudi Arabia, who was assigned by the state to investigate the incident, begins right from the start by separating the most probable defendants of the crime from this affair. Thus he assumes the role not of prosecution but of defense lawyer. And as a lawyer, every word he says turns after a while into evidence to be used against the defendants. Of course, not against those he has designated as defendants and for whom they are demanding the death penalty, but against those they are openly trying to protect.

44 days after the murder, he appears before the cameras and speaks with a strange self-confidence, as if he had almost completely clarified the murder in his own way. He has completed his investigation, turned it into an indictment, and in his indictment has even decided who is guilty and who is innocent. He says in no uncertain terms who is innocent of this affair.

When was the investigation completed? He does not have all the evidence he needs to clarify the incident. What is in the statements of the 18 people that were not shared with the Istanbul Chief Public Prosecutor? Even their statements mean nothing unless supported by the evidence at hand. These are officials who cannot make the slightest decision on their own. Did they themselves say that no one had assigned them, and that they had decided on their own to commit such a terrible murder, whose preparations had all been made in advance in every detail? Without any pressure at all?

Fine, they said so, but how could you be convinced of this? How did they explain why they had brought, on the planes allocated to them by the state, the tools for cutting, carving and destroying people that they had carefully prepared beforehand, and how did you believe it? Was it asked what a forensic medicine expert would be doing in a team whose aim was to meet with Khashoggi and persuade him?

In fact, Khashoggi missed and loved his country so much that even a senior official could easily have persuaded him by telephone to return. There was in any case no accusation, no conviction, no search warrant against him. Why would he have needed to be persuaded to return? So that what was done to him could be done in Riyadh rather than at the Istanbul Consulate General?

As the Saudi Attorney General speaks, he utters words that contradict one another, each of which can be treated as evidence against those they are trying to protect. There is not one murder but more than one. There is, so to speak, a serial murder.

Only one person died, but the operations carried out before and after the murder are as grave as those of a serial murder. Khashoggi's killing is one murder, but then the dismemberment of his body, its removal from the consulate and the carrying out of other procedures in another place, then the lies told for 12 days about what had happened to him, the attempt to obliterate all the evidence about the murder in plain view of everyone; each of these is an act that compounds crime upon crime and ties the murder into a series.

The Saudi Attorney General's Office had earlier admitted that the murder was premeditated; now it says that the decision was made suddenly by the 15-person team that came to Istanbul. They had first told this story calling it a "brawl", but since they could not convince anyone, they soon gave this up and in its place confessed the "premeditated murder" explanation. Now they are going back to the beginning, why?

Likewise, Foreign Minister Jubeir's "local collaborator" statement in answer to the question of where the body was had been rejected by the attorney general. He even said that it had not been said by Jubeir and had been fabricated by the media, but even he himself did not find this statement convincing. Now, again, and this time officially, they are returning to the "local collaborator" statement. Thus a country's attorney general has believed, and tried to make us believe, an explanation that children would find absurd even when they come across it in a cartoon. That is, they handed over the body of a murder carried out with such trouble and by committing a great crime, in passing along the road, to a man they did not know, striking a deal with him on the spot, is that so? Look, they themselves still do not know who this local collaborator is; they have only just approximately reached his face.

Meanwhile, by saying that the murder was carried out entirely by the team in question through a situation that developed in Istanbul, they are trying to ensure that responsibility does not stain anyone in Saudi Arabia, above all Qahtani. No one is left to blame but the execution team. Evidently they are ownerless, with no tribal affiliation or support behind them.

The only good thing about this story, which falls apart from whichever side you look at it and has no credibility at all, is the effort to conceal the real culprits behind the contradictions revealed by every word said. It is very obvious that these statements are trying to hide the real culprit, and this exposes the murder's real responsible parties even more.

In my view there is no need even to look for more evidence. A little more patience, and the story will emerge in all its clarity.