The Jamal Khashoggi case should be tried in Turkey

The murder of Jamal Khashoggi has been, since the day it was committed, the most talked-about event in the world and one with very serious effects on the balance of international relations. Every day in the world a thousand and one murders are committed, massacres take place, human rights are violated, yet none of them concerns the world as much as the Khashoggi murder. Perhaps all of them ultimately involve murder, the unjust taking of human lives, but none of them occupies the agenda as the Khashoggi murder does.

Indeed, those who committed the Khashoggi murder or who instigated it are still, every day, committing tons of similar murders and human rights violations both in their own countries and beyond them. If there is talk of a suspicion that certain parties are using this incident against Saudi Arabia, those same parties in fact have tons of material at hand that could be used against Saudi Arabia. Yet even that tons of material remains in the shadow of the Khashoggi murder.

The reasons for this can undoubtedly be discussed at length: from the standpoint of social psychology, or of the nature of the means of international communication, or of international relations...

Far beyond anyone's use of it, the Khashoggi murder has, by the manner in which it was carried out and the way it came to light, a character that deserves this attention. A murder committed in a country's consulate general, with the highest level of state authority, so planned, with such savage emotions and in such execution... A human being lured into a trap by state authority and decision, killed by 15 people in a diplomatic space with international immunity, and then his body cut to pieces and destroyed.

Not only the murder itself, but the lies that followed, invented one after another to mislead public opinion. The person who was brought in advance according to a plan to create the impression that he had disappeared, was disguised as Khashoggi, and entered a toilet in Sultanahmet square as Jamal Khashoggi and came out as Mustafa al-Madani, and so on. All of these are details that make the Khashoggi murder very special and very symbolic among all murders, the kind that make it the mother of all murders.

In fact, since the day the Khashoggi murder was committed, each of the moves undertaken to cover up the incident has been added to the murder as further crimes. Turkey's judicial officials being allowed into the crime scene only ten days later, the cleaning teams working feverishly before permission was given, before the eyes of the entire world, was undoubtedly an event amounting to an open confession of the crime. During the Saudi Attorney General's visit to Turkey, rather than giving information about what happened to Khashoggi's body and about the statements of the suspects in their hands, their asking for the originals of Khashoggi's cell phones, laptop and notes was recorded as an effort not in pursuit of justice but to destroy evidence in favor of those who committed the murder.

Meanwhile, as the trial they held to give the world the picture that they were handling this case had the level of the accusations lowered as far as possible even at the indictment stage, and some usual suspects were declared to have nothing to do with this incident, the perpetrators were in fact pointed out. In the end the Saudi judiciary dumped the whole thing on only 5 of the 20 defendants whom the Istanbul Chief Public Prosecutor's Office had identified and for whom it had issued arrest warrants, 18 of them perpetrators and 2 instigators. The court, which handed down death sentences to 5 people and acquittals to the others, subsequently also lifted the death sentences on those 5 people, on the basis of a statement obtained from Khashoggi's son saying that he forgave the perpetrators.

Can Khashoggi's sons have the authority to forgive the perpetrators of a murder like this, the mother of all murders, a murder that has the dimension of a crime committed against all humanity? Does the Sharia application they put forward permit this? Do those who invoke Sharia in this matter have the slightest respect for Sharia? These are separate questions, and of course illuminating ones. But they lay bare one reality in all its nakedness: Saudi Arabia has neither the capability nor the authority to try these killers. Because those who are defendants at this moment are people who have serious influence and authority over the Saudi judiciary and are still in a position to influence this judiciary.

There is no hope from the Saudi courts for justice for Khashoggi. Only the Turkish judiciary could do this, having no reason whatsoever to cast a shadow over its impartiality in this matter and, moreover, being the judiciary of the country where the incident was committed. Frankly, the whole world had long been awaiting a step from Turkey.

It was known that this work was being carried out at the Istanbul Chief Public Prosecutor's Office. In April the Prosecutor's Office opened the first phase of the case, which it had completed from the evidence it had been collecting for a long time. According to the indictment, Asiri and Kahtani are accused, as the suspects who made the assignments to carry out the killing of Khashoggi and gave the necessary instructions to the other suspects, of "Instigating Intentional Killing by Premeditation and by Torturing with Monstrous Feeling," while the other 18 were accused of "Intentional Killing by Premeditation and by Torturing with Monstrous Feeling."

Yesterday the first hearing of this case was held at the Istanbul 11th High Criminal Court.

Of course the court faces a very serious difficulty in that none of the 20 defendants, for whom arrest warrants were issued on the basis of the evidence in hand, is present. On top of that, it is not known what happened to the victim's body. But this difficulty is no obstacle to continuing the trial. After all, the "confessions," regarded as the mother of evidence, and the findings obtained together with these confessions suffice to prove the existence of the murder and to rule on who committed it.

The Khashoggi murder beginning to be heard in a Turkish court is a continuation of Turkey's consistent line, which from the start has not regarded the matter as a political issue between two countries but as a judicial-legal one. Of course, for a final verdict to be given, the defendants must be in custody and their statements must be taken. No one can prevent those who stand in the way of the defendants being brought before the judiciary from being described as accomplices, patrons or instigators of the killers.