In 2018, the Saudi Arabian authorities sent killers to Norway in order to get rid of the opposition leader and close friend of the Saudi journalist Jemal Hashkuji. This was reported by the news agency Anadolu agency citing the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet.
According to the newspaper, Riyadh sent a group of ten people to the country to eliminate Iyad al-Baghdadi. It is clarified that the Saudi Arabian authorities demanded diplomatic immunity for the “protection group”, referring to the Vienna Convention, which aroused suspicion from Foreign Ministry Norway and the country’s Intelligence Service.
The suspicions were related to the fact that the group of persons for whom immunity was requested consisted only of the members of the “security group”. Dagbladet journalists clarified that in the end, immunity was granted to only one person, who was listed as an “attaché”, but actually worked as a “security chief” at the Saudi Arabian embassy in Oslo. It is noted that the remaining nine people from the “security group” arrived in the country in the summer of 2018 and stayed there for some time.
In September, a court in Saudi Arabia sentenced eight people to prison for assassination of dissident Saudi journalist Jemal Hashkuji. The judges changed their minds to execute the murderers – earlier it was reported that five of them would be subjected to capital punishment. Five people received 20 years in prison, one convict will spend ten years in prison, two more – seven years each. This is the final decision of the court, which had previously issued several death sentences to the convicted. Hashkuji’s bride called such a court decision a farce.
The journalist disappeared on October 2, 2018 after a visit to the Saudi Consulate General in Istanbul. He went there to obtain documents that would help him file a divorce and remarry a Turkish woman. Turkish media, citing sources in law enforcement and investigative agencies, reported that the authorities have confirmation that Hashkuji was brutally tortured in the consulate building and then killed.
The Turkish government publication Yeni Safak, citing audio recordings confirming the massacre at the consulate, reported that the journalist’s fingers and head were cut off during the torture process. Other media also referred to the same audio recordings, but the Turkish authorities did not release them to the general public.