© REUTERS
The widow of murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi has been granted political asylum in the United States. This was reported by the American newspaper The Washington Post, for which Khashoggi wrote columns.
Thursday, December 21, 2023 at 10:12 PM
Khashoggi, a critic of the Saudi regime, was murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018. His widow Hanan Elatr then decided to go into hiding. According to The Washington Post, the woman fears her life will be in danger if she returns to her home country Egypt or the United Arab Emirates, where she lived for 26 years until Khashoggi’s death. She fled to the US after the murder.
Elatr and Khashoggi met in 2009 and married in an Islamic ceremony in 2018, The Washington Post reports. He continued to live in the US and she in Dubai. Later that year he moved to Turkey. Elatr did not know that Khashoggi had started a new relationship there. Before his death, the journalist was preparing to marry the Turkish Hatice Cengiz. He went to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to pick up a document stating that he was not married, at the request of Cengiz’s father.
The US holds Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman responsible for the murder, but the crown prince was declared inviolable by the US government last year. He denies involvement in Khashoggi’s murder. The accusations caused tension in the relationship between the US and Saudi Arabia for a time.
© AP
© AFP