Saudi Crown Prince Visits Turkey For First Time Since Jamal Khashoggi's Murder

Turkey's President Erdogan had once implicitly accused MBS of ordering the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia MBS and Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

(Photo Courtesy: Twitter/@Imamofpeace)

The crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud, popularly known as MBS, visited Turkey on Wednesday, 22 June, for the first time since 2018.

This was when the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Istanbul consulate of Saudi Arabia sent shockwaves across the world.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who had once implicitly accused MBS of ordering the killing, embraced him before they held talks.

MBS has vehemently and persistently denied any involvement in the murder of Khashoggi.

Turkey wants to boost trade and investment with Saudi Arabia in order to fix its worsening economic crisis, as it does with the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and even Israel.

Khashoggi was a US-based Washington Post columnist and an outspoken critic of MBS. He entered the Istanbul consulate of Saudi Arabia on 2 October 2018, which is where he was last seen.

He had gone to get papers that he required to marry his Turkish fiancee, Hatice Cengiz.

Reports said that he did not come out of the consulate in one piece, after a UN investigator concluded that Khashoggi had been "brutally slain" by a team of agents from Riyadh, and that his corpse had been dismembered.

A year after the murder, a Saudi court handed death sentences to five people, but that was later amended to 20-year prison terms.

"The political legitimacy he earns through the visits he makes to a different country every day doesn't change the fact that he is a murderer," Khashoggi's wife tweeted about Erdogan's decision to welcome MBS into Turkey.

(With inputs from the BBC and Reuters.)