[MAIL] At 1.14pm on October 2, Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi walked into the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul and off the face of this Earth. He vanished as if he had never existed. But the fallout from his disappearance grows by the day.It is now widely believed that Mr Khashoggi was killed in the building by members of a 15-strong Saudi regime hit squad that had flown into the city earlier the same day.
On Monday, police and prosecutors inspected the consulate building in Istanbul for more than eight hours.
Now Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said they found fresh paint in the building where Mr Khashoggi vanished.
Turkish officials believe he was killed and dismembered in the consulate. According to reports, the government has an audio recording which they have shared as evidence with Saudi Arabia and the US.
Yesterday, it was alleged that a recording suggested the journalist had had his fingers cut off one by one while still alive.
A former adviser to the inner circle of the autocratic House of Saud, rulers of the super-wealthy desert kingdom, Mr Khashoggi had become an emigre critic of its abuses. The Sauds wanted him ’out of the picture’, he recently told a journalist.
They have succeeded, but only in the physical sense. His image is now all over the internet, newspapers and television screens.
Parallels with the nerve agent poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal by agents of Russia’s GRU military spy agency in Salisbury have been drawn. Here was an authoritarian regime seeking to eliminate a dissident on foreign soil in a brutal and flagrant manner.