SAUDI KING, CROWN PRINCE EXPRESS CONDOLENCES TO KHASHOGGI SON

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Turkish police find abandoned Saudi consulate car, allege body double

CAIRO, Oct 22, (Agencies): Saudi King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman called slain Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s son, Salah, to express their condolences, the Saudi Press Agency said late on Sunday.

Saudi Arabia has said that Khashoggi, a prominent journalist and critic of Saudi rulers, died in a fight inside its Istanbul consulate – after two weeks of denials that it had anything to do with his disappearance.

Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan left for Saudi Arabia to attend an investment conference boycotted by other leaders over the death of Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey. Khan told an interviewer before leaving he was concerned at Khashoggi’s death but could not skip the conference because “we’re desperate” for possible Saudi loans to shore up Pakistan’s economy.

It is Khan’s second visit to Saudi Arabia in just over a month, but he has not succeeded in securing significant financial assistance to stave off a looming balance of payment crisis. Khan told the Middle East Eye in an interview published on Monday that he could not pass up the invitation to meet Saudi leaders again. “The reason I feel I have to avail myself of this opportunity is because in a country of 210 million people right now we have the worst debt crisis in our history,” he was quoted as saying. “Unless we get loans from friendly countries or the IMF (International Monetary Fund), we actually won’t have in another two or three months enough foreign exchange to service our debts or to pay for our imports.

So we’re desperate at the moment.” Finance Minister Asad Umar and Commerce Minister Abdul Razak Dawood are accompanying Khan, a statement from Khan’s office said on Monday, adding it “will give a chance to connect with those people who are interested in investing in Pakistan”.

Islamabad has already asked the IMF to open negotiations for the country’s second potential bailout in five years. Khan, who took office in July, still has been seeking alternatives to the tough conditions the IMF is likely to impose for loans, limiting his vision of an Islamic welfare state.

The central bank’s foreign reserves dropped this month to $8.1 billion, a four-year low and barely enough to cover sovereign debt payments due through the end of the year. The current account deficit has swelled to about $18 billion. Khan has blamed the previous government’s policies for the ballooning current account deficit. He told the Middle East Eye that he was concerned over the “shocking” death of Khashoggi, a US resident and Washington Post columnist, after he entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. “The Saudi government will have to come up with an answer … We wait for whatever the Saudi explanation is,” he was quoted as saying. “We hope there is an explanation that satisfies people and those responsible are punished.”

Siemens
CEO out Siemens’ chief executive said on Monday he would not attend a three-day Future Investment Initiative conference in Saudi Arabia after the country admitted that Khashoggi had been killed in its consulate in Istanbul.

The German engineering giant was one of the last companies to decide against sending its top executive to the conference. “Siemens is a reliable and committed partner of the Kingdom and its VISION 2030. But for now, truth needs to be found out and justice applied,” Siemens CEO Joe Kaeser said in a statement posted on his LinkedIn account outlining his motivation not to travel to the conference in the Saudi capital Riyadh.

“Time will tell how things will develop. And I do hope there will be clarity, transparency, and justice sooner rather than later,” he said. Khashoggi’s killing in Istanbul had been “monstrously planned”, a spokesman for Turkey’s ruling AK party said on Monday. An adviser to Turkey’s president rejected Riyadh’s assertion that Khashoggi died in a fight, suggesting this “mocked” international opinion.

Three European powers – Germany, Britain and France – pressed Saudi Arabia to present all the facts in the killing, and Chancellor Angela Merkel said over the weekend that Germany would not export arms to Saudi Arabia while uncertainty over Khashoggi’s fate persisted.

Last week ABB Chief Executive Ulrich Spiesshofer said he would also bow out of attending, following in the footsteps of others including Airbus defence chief Dirk Hoke and Deutsche Bank CEO Christian Sewing.

Senior finance and trade officials from various Western governments including the United States will also shun the forthcoming conference because of Khashoggi’s killing. Kaeser said his decision to skip the event was no condemnation of the Saudi population or a value judgment on Siemens’ 2,000 local employees in Saudi Arabia and partners like Saudi Aramco, SABIC, SEC and the Abunayyan group. Kaeser said he wanted to consider the interests of all stakeholders, taking into account a business opportunity worth up to $30 billion by 2030 as well as the company’s reputation, before taking a decision.

“But sometimes, situations develop in such a way that no one can win, where every option is wrong. The socalled Khashoggi crisis, the death of Khashoggi, is such a situation.” SoftBank Group Corp’s Chief Operating Officer Marcelo Claure will not be attending the Saudi Arabia investment conference this week, Bloomberg reported on Monday, citing a person familiar with the matter.

Claure is the latest high profile exec-utive to pull out of the conference amid mounting pressure on Riyadh over the disappearance and alleged killing of Khashoggi. A SoftBank spokeswoman declined to comment.

Chief executive officers of top US firms JPMorgan Chase, Blackstone Group, BlackRock Inc and the chairman of Ford Motor Co have pulled out of the event in recent days. SoftBank’s Claure requested the organisers of the Saudi Arabia conference to remove his name from the list of speakers, and said he will not attend, Bloomberg reported, adding that the Japanese conglomerate’s founder Masayoshi Son is yet to confirm if he will attend.

A man appearing to wear Khashoggi’s clothes left the Saudi consulate in Istanbul following his killing there, according to a surveillance video, while a member of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s entourage made four calls to the royal’s office around the same time, reports said Monday.

The reports by CNN and a progovernment Turkish newspaper came just a day before Prince Mohammed’s high-profile investment summit is to begin in Riyadh and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has promised that details of Khashoggi’s killing “will be revealed in all its nakedness.” CNN aired surveillance footage on Monday showing the man in Khashoggi’s dress shirt, suit jacket and pants.

It cited a Turkish official as describing the man as a “body double” and a member of the Saudi team sent to Istanbul to target the writer. The man is seen in the footage walking out of the consulate via its back exit with an accomplice, then taking a taxi to Istanbul’s famed Sultan Ahmed Mosque, where he went into a public bathroom, changed back out of the clothes and left. The state-run broadcaster TRT later also reported that a man who entered the consulate building was seen leaving the building in Khashoggi’s clothes.

Abandoned car
Turkish police on Monday found an abandoned car belonging to the Saudi consulate at an underground car park in Istanbul, three weeks after the murder of Khashoggi at the Kingdom’s mission. The car, which had diplomatic number plates, was found in an underground car park in the Sultangazi district of the city, the state-run Anadolu news agency and TRT World channel said. Registration documents showed that the vehicle belonged to the consulate, they added.

Police have asked prosecutors and the Saudi consulate for permission to search the vehicle. Police cordoned off access to the car park, where large numbers of media have gathered, an AFP photographer said. White House senior adviser Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son in law, said on Monday the United States is still in a “fact-finding” phase on the murder of dissident Khashoggi. Asked about the credibility of a Saudi investigation of the killing that took place in their Istanbul consulate, Kushner told CNN: “We’re getting facts in from multiple places.”

Hackers
A website for a Saudi investment summit was down on Monday after an apparent cyber attack, just a day before the three-day conference overshadowed by the murder of Khashoggi begins. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the apparent attack on the Future Investment Initiative (FII) website, as organisers scrambled to prepare for the summit after a string of cancellations from global business titans over the murder. Hackers appeared to deface the website with a host of critical messages over its role in the war in Yemen and accusing the Kingdom of terrorism financing. The website was later taken down.

Organisers of FII did not respond to requests for comment. Local media, including the pro-government Okaz newspaper, said the website had come under an “electronic attack”. The forum, nicknamed “Davos in the Desert”, was meant to project the historically insular petro-state as a lucrative business destination and set the stage for new ventures and multibillion dollar contracts. But it has been overshadowed by growing global outrage over the murder of Khashoggi inside the Kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul. Dozens of global executives – from bankers JP Morgan to carmaker Ford and ride-hailing app Uber – have scrapped plans to attend.

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