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Norway summons Saudi envoy over Khashoggi murder

Friday, 02 November 2018 2:08 PM [ Last Update: Friday, 02 November 2018 3:17 PM ]

A Saudi official walks in front of the door of the Saudi consulate on November 1, 2018 in Istanbul, Turkey. (Photo by AFP)

Norway has summoned Saudi Arabia’s ambassador over the killing of dissident Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Arab kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul last month.

"We have raised the murder of Jamal Khashoggi and presented our point of view to the Saudi ambassador several times after it was known," Norwegian Foreign Minister Ine Eriksen Soereide said in a statement on Friday.

"We underlined how seriously we take this issue again yesterday, when he was at the Foreign Ministry for a discussion."

Khashoggi, 59, an outspoken critic of Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, had been living in self-imposed exile in the United States since 2017, when Saudi authorities launched a massive crackdown on dissent.

He was seeking to secure documentation for his forthcoming marriage when he entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2, but never came out despite Riyadh’s initial claim that he exited the mission less than an hour after completing his paperwork.

The kingdom, however, later admitted that Khashoggi had been murdered in the consulate during an interrogation by rogue operatives that had gone wrong after diplomatic pressure grew tremendously on Riyadh to give an account on the mysterious fate of its national. However, Saudi Arabia said that it did not know the whereabouts of the body, which is widely believed to have been dismembered.

Turkish judicial officials said on Wednesday that Khashoggi was "strangled" as soon as he entered the diplomatic mission and his body was then "cut into pieces" under a "premeditated plan."

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