Saudi prince 'approved Khashoggi killing' - US
A US intelligence report has discovered that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman approved the murder of exiled Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.
The report released by the Biden administration says the prince approved a plan to either "capture or kill" Khashoggi.
The US announced sanctions on a large number of Saudis but not the prince himself.
Saudi Arabia rejected the report, calling it "negative, false and unacceptable".
Crown Prince Mohammed, who is effectively the kingdom's ruler, has got denied any role on the murder.
Khashoggi was killed while visiting the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, and his body break up.
The 59-year-old journalist had once been an adviser to the Saudi government and near to the royal family but he fell out of favour and went into self-imposed exile in the US in 2017.
From there, he wrote a monthly column in the Washington Content where he criticised the policies of Prince Mohammed.
"We examine that Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman permitted an operation in Istanbul to fully capture or kill Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi," the article by any office of the US director of national intelligence says.
The crown prince may be the son of Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud and is regarded as the effective ruler of the kingdom.
The intelligence report lists three reasons for believing that the crown prince must have approved the operation:
The direct involvement in the operation of one of his advisers together with members of his protective detail
His "support for employing violent measures to silence dissidents abroad"
The report goes on to name individuals allegedly complicit in, or in charge of, Khashoggi's death. Nonetheless it says "we do not know how far in advance" those involved prepared to harm him.
Saudi authorities have blamed the killing in a "rogue operation" by a workforce of agents delivered to go back the journalist to the kingdom, and a Saudi courtroom tried and sentenced five individuals to twenty years in prison previous September, after initially sentencing them to loss of life.
In 2019, UN specialized rapporteur Agnes Callamard accused the Saudi state of the "deliberate, premeditated execution" of Khashoggi and dismissed the Saudi trial as an "antithesis of justice".
