Five direct participants in the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul have been sentenced to death by a Saudi court, and three other accomplices have been sentenced to a total of 24 years in prison.
It is clear that the list of those sentenced does not only include the main figure who, according to the majority of commentators, gave the green light for the killing of Khashoggi, but also the leading organizers of this murder — Saud al-Qahtani, the right-hand man of Muhammad bin Salman, who was not even involved in this case, and the deputy head of intelligence, Ahmad al-Assiri, who was acquitted due to lack of evidence of his guilt.
Nevertheless, in such situations, even the conviction of the «triggers» and their extradition by those who gave them the orders is already a result. After all, at least some of the «triggermen» may think the next time they receive a similar order: «Will they not make me a scapegoat for this and put me up against the wall with the same people who gave the order?
For comparison, in Russia, Andrei Lugovoi, accused by British law enforcement agencies of the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, was not only not convicted, but was demonstratively awarded by Vladimir Putin himself, and after that he made a career in Russian politics. And there are many such examples of demonstrative cover-ups of murderers by the Russian authorities.
The closest parallel to the case of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was killed abroad by Saudi killers, is the murder of Russian journalists Orkhan Dzhemal, Kirill Radchenko and Alexander Rastorguev abroad by Russian killers. The organizers of the murder of Russian journalists are practically proved. However, instead of demonstratively punishing at least the direct participants and accomplices of this murder, pretending to care about their own reputation and claiming that this decision was not made at the highest level, but was the excesses of the executors, the Russian authorities consistently block the investigation of this case. Meanwhile, other authorities, especially the American ones, are beginning to take this case seriously… We have already written about the initiative of the American senators Marco Rubio and Christopher Coons to open an investigation into this murder through the UN mission in the Central African Republic, asking the Secretary General of the organization, Antonio Guterres, to take it under his control.
And this week in the U.S. Senate, the name of a person whose involvement in this murder is to be investigated by the State Department and the CIA was mentioned — Yevgeny Prigozhin. This aspect, along with Yevgeny Prigozhin’s extensive activities in the Central African Republic and other countries, will have to be investigated within the framework of the bill «Protecting American Security from the Kremlin Act of Aggression», which was approved by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and put to a vote.
So we must wait and see which earthly court will finally convict the murderers of Russian journalists, including our brother Orkhan.