Hatice Cengiz, the fiancee of slain dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi, filed a lawsuit on Thursday against Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in United States federal court.
Cengiz, a Turkish citizen, is seeking unspecified damages and has accused the crown prince of personally ordering Khashoggi’s assassination, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday. Khashoggi was killed and dismembered by a team of more than a dozen Saudi operatives in Saudi Arabia’s Turkish consulate in October 2018. Khashoggi visited the consulate to obtain the paperwork necessary to marry Cengiz.
The civil suit was filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia under the Torture Victims Protection Act and the Alien Tort Statute, allowing non-U.S. citizens to file lawsuits in U.S. courts over allegations of torture or extrajudicial killings committed in foreign countries.
“I am hopeful that we can achieve truth and justice for Jamal through this lawsuit,” Cengiz said. “Jamal believed anything was possible in America, and I place my trust in the American civil justice system to obtain a measure of justice and accountability.”
Joining Cengiz in the lawsuit is Democracy for the Arab World Now, a human rights nonprofit organization founded by the late Khashoggi. In addition to the crown prince, the suit names more than 20 co-defendants in Saudi Arabia.
Earlier this year, former top Saudi intelligence official Saad al Jabri filed a lawsuit under the same statute Cengiz used and alleged that the crown prince dispatched a hit team known as the “Tiger Squad” to Canada to assassinate him in 2018, a year after he fled the kingdom.
Khashoggi’s death sparked intense backlash from Congress, and the CIA determined that the crown prince personally ordered the killing. Despite the outcry, President Trump signed an emergency order just months later that allowed the U.S. to sell weapons to the kingdom by circumventing Congress.
Besides Israel, Saudi Arabia is perhaps the closest U.S. ally in the Middle East and a crucial counterbalance to Iran and Iranian proxies in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, where the kingdom is currently embroiled in an ongoing battle to squelch the Houthi insurgency. The Houthi rebels are backed by Iran, which has sent over weapons used to attack Saudi Arabia.
