Turkey accused Saudi Arabia of failing to cooperate with a probe into thedisappearance of a journalist inside its Istanbul consulate, as US President Donald Trump threatened “severe punishment” if it turns out he was killed.
Comments by Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu represented a hardening of Ankara’s hitherto circumspect tone over the case of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who has not been seen since he stepped inside the consulate on October 2.
Turkish officials have said they believe Khashoggi was killed inside the consulate and lurid claims have been leaked to media that he was tortured and even dismembered, while Trump has also struck a pessimistic tone about the missing journalist’s fate.
Saudi Arabia insists Khashoggi, a Washington Post contributor whose writings have been critical of powerful Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, left the building safely but has yet to offer visual evidence of this.
The outcry surrounding his disappearance threatens to not just harm brittle Turkey-Saudi relations but also alarm the kingdom’s supporters in the West and tarnish the reform drive spearheaded by the crown prince.
“We’re going to get to the bottom of it and there will be severe punishment,” Trump told CBS’s “60 Minutes,” according to an extract of an interview that was released on Saturday.
“As of this moment, they (Saudi) deny it and they deny it vehemently. Could it be them? Yes,” Trump said in the interview, which was conducted on Thursday.