He ran social media for Saudi Arabia\u2019s crown prince. He masterminded the arrest of hundreds of his country\u2019s elite. He detained a Lebanese prime minister. And, according to two intelligence sources, he ran journalist Jamal Khashoggi\u2019s brutal killing at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul by giving orders over Skype.<\/p>\n
Saud al-Qahtani, a top aide of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, is one of the fall guys as Riyadh tries to stem international outrage at Khashoggi\u2019s death. On Saturday, Saudi state media said King Salman had sacked Qahtani and four other officials over the killing carried out by a 15-man hit team.<\/p>\n
But Qahtani\u2019s influence in the crown prince\u2019s entourage has been so vast over the past three years his own rise tracking that of his boss that it will be hard for Saudi officials to paint Qahtani as the mastermind of the murder without also raising questions about the involvement of Prince Mohammed, according to several sources with links to the royal court.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis episode won\u2019t topple Salman, but it has hit his image which will take a long time to be repaired if it ever does. The king is protecting him,\u201d one of the sources with ties to the royal court said.<\/p>\n
\u201cDo you think I make decisions without guidance? I am an employee and a faithful executor of the orders of my lord the king and my lord the faithful crown prince,\u201d Qahtani tweeted last summer.<\/p>\n
Qahtani did not respond to questions from Reuters. His biography on Twitter changed in recent days from royal adviser to chairman of the Saudi Federation for Cybersecurity, Programming and Drones, a role he had held before.<\/p>\n
Prince Mohammed had no knowledge of the operation that led to Khashoggi\u2019s death and \u201ccertainly did not order a kidnapping or murder of anybody\u201d, a Saudi official said on Saturday. Officials in Riyadh could not be reached for further comment.<\/p>\n
As the crisis has grown over the past three weeks, Saudi Arabia has changed its tune on Khashoggi\u2019s fate, first denying his death, then saying he died during a brawl at the consulate, and now attributing the death to a chokehold.<\/p>\n
A senior Saudi official told Reuters that the killers had tried to cover up what happened, contending that the truth was only now emerging. The Turks reject that version of the story, saying they have audio recordings of what happened.<\/p>\n
The kingdom has survived other crises in the past year, including the fallout of the crown prince\u2019s short-lived kidnapping of Lebanese prime minister Saad al-Hariri in 2017. Hariri, too, was verbally humiliated and beaten, according to eight Saudi, Arab and Western diplomatic sources. The man leading that interrogation: Saud al-Qahtani.<\/p>\n
France intervened to free Hariri, but Western capitals did not take Riyadh to task for detaining a head of government – and Prince Mohammed emerged emboldened, according to these Saudi sources.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
He ran social media for Saudi Arabia\u2019s crown prince. He masterminded the arrest of hundreds of his country\u2019s elite. He detained a Lebanese prime minister. And, according to two intelligence sources, he ran journalist Jamal Khashoggi\u2019s brutal killing at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul by giving orders over Skype. Saud al-Qahtani, a top aide of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":45162,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-45161","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45161","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45161"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45161\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":45163,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45161\/revisions\/45163"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/45162"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}