Doing what I do in the places I do it, I cannot be neutral on this one. I can be fair-minded yes, but neutral no. The bodies of dead friends get in the way. I saw Abdul Shariff gunned down before my eyes in South Africa in 1994. A bullet went through his back and dented the Nikon camera around his neck. I heard his cry of agony as the young men dragged him out of the line of fire. He was dead before he got to hospital. Gunmen had opened up on a group of journalists and politicians. I have mourned another friend, Kate Peyton, assassinated in Somalia in 1995. She was a lovely, decent human being, and a journalist of absolute integrity.
They are but two out of numerous friends and colleagues who paid with their lives for telling the truth. On this newspaper, on June 26 each year we mourn Veronica Guerin, murdered by lowlife drug dealers in 1996.
So far this year, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 44 of our tribe have been killed for doing their jobs. The latest and most high profile is Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi writer who vanished after a visit to his country’s Istanbul consulate on October 2. Having surveyed the available evidence, the weight of probability is that Jamal Khashoggi was murdered. Let us say this straight. Let us not become accomplices in the obliteration of truth.
At first the Saudis insisted he had left the consulate alive. A lie. They were caught out on that one thanks to the presence of surveillance cameras. They then floated – through anonymous sources – the ”he died of a heart attack” theory. That didn’t fly either. There was the small matter of the body. If he had died of a heart attack, produce the corpse and let a doctor conduct a post-mortem examination to confirm the claim. To this date there has been no sign of a corpse. Instead we have had briefings from the Turks that his body was dismembered and despatched from the embassy packed into boxes and hidden inside black vans. Turkish police are now searching a forest near Istanbul.
We were also enjoined to believe it had been an interrogation gone wrong, an abduction gone wrong. There was a propaganda blitz aimed at portraying the whole affair as a conspiracy mounted by Qatar with whom Saudi Arabia is locked in political conflict. Oh and we were also encouraged to believe this was the action of a rogue unit. For a Kingdom that spends millions on spin doctors and lobbyists in the West, this was an incompetent litany of deceit.
The Turks disobligingly revealed CCTV footage from outside the consulate and the presence of 15 Saudis inside who had arrived in Istanbul that very morning. Among them was a forensic doctor of the kind who might be useful in dealing with a corpse.
Even the Saudi’s traditional best friends in Washington and London realised this wouldn’t do. President Trump despatched his CIA chief, Mike Pompeo, to Riyadh and Istanbul. Whatever Pompeo saw and heard he came back bearing bad tidings, so much so that Trump spoke of it being ”bad, bad stuff” and said Saudi Arabia’s leaders could expect ”severe” action if it were discovered they had ordered the killing. Keep this last sentence in mind for what comes later.