Sixteen Saudi nationals believed to be involved in last year’s murder of Jamal Khashoggi have been barred from the U.S. along with their families, the State Department announced Monday.
A statement said Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is “publicly designating” these individuals under Section 7031(c) of the Department of State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs Appropriations Act of 2019.
That section of the law “provides that, in cases where the Secretary of State has credible information that officials of foreign governments have been involved in significant corruption or gross violations of human rights, those individuals and their immediate family members are ineligible for entry into the United States,” the State Department said. “The law requires the Secretary of State to publicly or privately designate such officials and their immediate family members.”
The sixteen Saudi nationals named by the State Department are: Saud al-Qahtani, Maher Mutreb, Salah Tubaigy, Meshal Albostani, Naif Alarifi, Mohammed Alzahrani, Mansour Abahussain, Khalid Alotaibi, Abdulaziz Alhawsawi, Waleed Alsehri, Thaar Alharbi, Fahad Albalawi, Badr Alotaibi, Mustafa Almadani, Saif Alqahtani, and Turki Alsehri.
They are the same people who, in November, were targeted by Treasury Department human rights sanctions, in addition to Mohammed Alotaibi, Saudi Arabia’s consul general in Istanbul at the time of the murder, for being “involved in the abhorrent killing” of Khashoggi. The sanctions were administered under the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act, a federal law targeting international human rights abusers. Any interests or properties that any of them had within U.S. jurisdiction were blocked.
Khashoggi, a Saudi activist and dissident who wrote for the Washington Post, was murdered at Saudi Arabia’s consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, on Oct. 2, 2018.
Following a meeting with King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in January, Pompeo said: “Our expectations have been clear from early on: Every single person who has responsibility for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi needs to be held accountable.”
Pompeo said the royals “both acknowledged that that accountability needed to take place.”
“You should know that the United States continues to work through its fact-finding process as well. That is, our efforts to uncover the facts surrounding this. And then, consistent with the president’s commitment to hold everyone accountable, we continue inside the United States government to do that as well,” Pompeo said at the time.
The Senate voted unanimously in December to blame “Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for the murder of Khashoggi.”
