A US federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit against Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in the brutal murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. In doing so, he is following the position of President Joe Biden’s government, according to which Mohammed should enjoy immunity, Judge John Bates said on Tuesday (local time) in Washington. At the same time, he admitted that the crown prince had “credible allegations of involvement” in the murder of Khashoggi.
Khashoggi went to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2, 2018 to collect documents for his marriage to his Turkish fiancé, Hatice Cengiz. He never came out. After lengthy denials, the leadership in Riyadh, under international pressure, admitted that Khashoggi had been killed in the consulate in a failed attempt to bring him back to his homeland.
The CIA later concluded that he was murdered and dismembered on the Crown Prince’s orders. Khashoggi worked as a columnist for the Washington Post in US exile and wrote critical texts about the Saudi royal family.
The lawsuit against Mohammed bin Salman was filed by Cengiz and a human rights group founded by Khashoggi. It also names two senior followers of the Saudi de facto ruler as alleged accomplices.
Judge Bates encouraged the Biden administration to comment on the lawsuit. The State Department responded in November that as his country’s prime minister, Crown Prince Mohammed should be protected from prosecution. He had only been appointed head of government by his father, King Salman, weeks earlier – a temporary exception to the code whereby the king is actually prime minister. Khashoggi’s fiancée and the human rights group saw the move as a ploy to protect the crown prince from prosecution by the US judiciary.
Judge Bates also admitted his “discomfort” with the circumstances surrounding Muhammad’s new title. But the government’s position leaves him no choice but to dismiss the lawsuit against the crown prince. He did the same with the two Saudi co-defendants. They are not subject to US jurisdiction, he argued.
As a presidential candidate, Biden had announced that he wanted to treat Saudi Arabia like a “pariah state” because of the assassination of Khashoggi. However, in view of high energy prices, he traveled to the Kingdom in July, where he met Crown Prince Mohammed. Recently, Washington also tried unsuccessfully to dissuade Riyadh from cutting oil production by the Saudi Arabian-dominated oil alliance Opec. The shortage in supply is intended to drive up the price of oil, which in turn benefits Moscow from the US perspective, which can use the proceeds to continue financing the war of aggression against Ukraine.