A former top Saudi intelligence official filed a lawsuit claiming that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman dispatched a hit team to North America to kill him.
Saad al Jabri filed a lawsuit in U.S. federal court on Thursday, claiming that the order to assassinate him came in 2018, a year after he fled Saudi Arabia in advance of a purge by bin Salman, who had recently taken over as the new crown prince.
According to Jabri, bin Salman demanded that he return to the kingdom after he fled. The crown prince allegedly told the former intelligence official over encrypted communications platform WhatsApp that he would use “all available means” to get him to return and threatened to “take measures that would be harmful to [Jabri].”
In addition to the threatening messages, the Saudi government has also arrested his two adult children in what he called in court documents a “crude form of human bait in an effort to lure [him] to Saudi Arabia so that he can be killed.”
The crown prince also attempted to have Jabri extradited and filed a notice with Interpol, the international police group, to have him shipped back to Saudi Arabia on corruption charges. The New York Times verified that Interpol later removed Jabri from its database after it was determined the request was politically motivated.
The Saudi efforts to control Jabri culminated with a death squad in 2018, he alleged. The lawsuit said that a team known as the “Tiger Squad” arrived at an airport in Ontario in October 2018 equipped with tourist visas and ominously carrying forensic gear. Jabri alleged that the team was turned away from entering Canada by border officials.
According to the lawsuit, the hit squad came to Canada less than two weeks after Saudi dissident and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi was killed and dismembered by another team of operatives in Turkey, drawing international condemnation and putting bin Salman under scrutiny.
Jabri has long had close ties to Western intelligence, including the Five Eyes, an intelligence-sharing cooperative between the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. He was also incredibly close to Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, who was crown prince under King Salman from 2015 until he was overthrown by bin Salman in a bloodless coup. Bin Nayef was arrested for treason in March.
When contacted by the Washington Examiner about this story, a spokesperson with the State Department highlighted Jabri’s past partnership with the U.S.
“Saad al Jabri was a valued partner to the United States on countering terrorism. Saad’s work with the United States helped save American and Saudi lives. Many U.S. government officials, both current and former, know and respect Sa’ad,” the spokesperson said.
Jabri’s lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia under the Torture Victims Protection Act and the Alien Tort Statute, measures that permit non-U.S. citizens to file lawsuits in U.S. courts for certain crimes committed in other countries.
The Washington Examiner reached out to the Saudi Embassy in Washington for comment but did not immediately receive a response. The CIA declined to comment on the matter.
