Middle East

Eugene

(62,748 posts) Mon Mar 18, 2019, 02:47 PM Mar 2019

Saudi crown prince ran brutal campaign to silence dissent more than a year before Khashoggi murder,

Source: The Independent

Saudi crown prince ran brutal campaign to silence dissent more than a year before Khashoggi murder, US officials say

Secret campaign allegedly includes kidnapping, detention and torture of Saudi citizens

Mark Mazzetti, Ben Hubbard
9 hours ago

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia authorised a secret campaign to silence dissenters – which included the surveillance, kidnapping, detention and torture of Saudi citizens – more than a year before the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, according to US officials who have read classified intelligence reports about the campaign.

At least some of the clandestine missions were carried out by members of the same team that killed and dismembered Khashoggi in Istanbul in October, suggesting that his killing was a particularly egregious part of a wider campaign to silence Saudi dissidents, according to the officials and associates of some of the Saudi victims.

Members of the team that killed Khashoggi, which US officials called the Saudi Rapid Intervention Group, were involved in at least a dozen operations starting in 2017, the officials said.

Some of the operations involved forcibly repatriating Saudis from other Arab countries and detaining and abusing prisoners in palaces belonging to the crown prince and his father, King Salman, the officials and associates said.

One of the Saudis detained by the group, a university lecturer in linguistics who wrote a blog about women in Saudi Arabia, tried to kill herself last year after being subjected to psychological torture, according to US intelligence reports and others briefed on her situation.

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