The disappearance of a prominent critic of Saudi Arabia’s rulers after entering the kingdom’s Istanbul consulate risks severely tarnishing the reformist image of its de facto leader Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, experts say.
Riyadh has denied allegations made by Turkish officials that Saudi columnist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered inside the kingdom’s mission by a team sent specially to Istanbul. Analysts said that while the claim of a state-sponsored killing of the Washington Post contributor was unconfirmed, it would seriously damage the prince’s credentials as a reformer if true. "It would be a major blow to the image that Saudi Arabia’s advocates have so carefully tried to cultivate in the west, particularly in Washington," Kristian Ulrichsen, a fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute in the United States, told AFP.
Britain said on Sunday it was "working urgently" to verify the "extremely serious" allegations surrounding Khashoggi, who has been critical of some of Prince Mohammed’s policies and of Riyadh’s intervention in the Yemen war. The 33-year-old crown prince, who was named heir to the throne in June 2017, has garnered international attention with his rapid rise to power as well as social and economic reforms.
While he has been lauded by some for pursuing changes such as lifting a decades-long ban on women driving, others have criticised his recent crackdown on political dissent. The kingdom has detained a number of human rights and women campaigners this year, some of them accused of undermining national security, with scant public information about their whereabouts or the legal status of their cases.
Prince Mohammed -- commonly known as MBS -- was also the subject of criticism in November 2017 when he was accused of placing Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri under house arrest in Riyadh.
The same month dozens of Saudi officials were arrested in what the authorities said was an anti-corruption crackdown. Khashoggi’s alleged murder -- if confirmed -- threatens to undermine Riyadh’s already strained relations with Ankara, and the fallout could also reach the US, a key ally, experts said.
"It would likely trigger a diplomatic crisis with Turkey as well as play into a narrative in Washington DC that views Saudi Arabia under MBS as prone to seemingly reckless gambits with little apparent thought for the consequences, be it the blockade of Qatar, the detention of Saad Hariri, the rupture with Canada, to say nothing of the war in Yemen."
