WASHINGTON: The fiancee of Jamal Khashoggi said yesterday that President Joe Biden had enabled Saudi Arabia’s crown prince to take more victims after the US leader met and fist-bumped the man accused of ordering the journalist’s murder.
In the form of what she imagined as a tweet by Khashoggi, Hatice Cengiz wrote to Biden, “Is this the accountability you promised for my murder? The blood of MBS’s next victim is on your hands.”
Khashoggi, a Saudi who wrote critically of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in The Washington Post, was strangled to death and dismembered in October 2018 after entering the kingdom’s Istanbul consulate to fill out paperwork to marry Cengiz, who is Turkish.
Biden had vowed as a candidate to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah” but travelled yesterday to Jeddah and was pictured fist-bumping the 36-year-old de facto ruler of the oil-rich kingdom.
“The fist bump between President Biden and Mohammed bin Salman was worse than a handshake — it was shameful,” said Fred Ryan, the publisher and CEO of The Washington Post, which has demanded accountability for the death of its late contributor.
“It projected a level of intimacy and comfort that delivers to MBS the unwarranted redemption that he is seeking,” Ryan said in a statement. — AFP
