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Tag: Mohammed Bin Salman

  • Saudi Crown Prince invited to the UK – government source

    Saudi Crown Prince invited to the UK – government source

    Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Crown Prince, has been invited to the UK, a government source claims.

    According to the official diary, No. 10 would confirm the Prime Minister’s engagements in the usual way.

    A different government source said there is no reason to think the visit won’t happen.

    This would be the first visit since the journalist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018.

    At the time, the Western world condemned the murder of Mr. Khashoggi, a critic of the Saudi Arabian regime.

    US intelligence agencies came to the conclusion that the prince must have approved the killing despite the prince’s assertions that he was involved in it.

    In recent months, UK politicians have expressed a desire for tighter ties with the kingdom. To diversify its economy away from oil, the country built an office in London for its trillion-pound investment fund.

    Grant Shapps, the secretary of energy security, met with Saudi Arabia earlier this year to discuss expanding cooperation in areas like space, technology, and essential minerals.

    Additionally, the administration has been considering whether to back a trade agreement with the Gulf Cooperation Council. James Cleverly, the foreign secretary, recently visited Kuwait, Jordan, and Qatar.

    In the course of discussions with Gulf officials about reducing dependency on Russian oil and gas, the then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson met the crown prince in the Saudi capital of Riyadh last year.

    He was invited to the Queen’s burial in September, but declined, sending a senior Saudi royal in his stead.

    Six months before to Mr. Khashoggi’s death, in March 2018, Theresa May was the prime minister when he last travelled to the UK.

    The prince, who serves as the de facto head of state for the largest oil exporter in the world, received praise from Western leaders for implementing certain changes in the traditional Gulf state, such as removing the ban on women driving.

    However, the murder of Mr. Khashoggi seriously harmed his standing internationally.

  • Mohammed bin Salman: Saudi leader given US immunity over Khashoggi killing

    The US has determined that Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader – Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman – has immunity from a lawsuit filed by murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s fiancée.

    Mr Khashoggi, a prominent Saudi critic, was murdered at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October 2018.

    US intelligence has said it believes Prince Mohammed ordered the killing.

    But in court filings, the US State department said he has immunity due to his new role as Saudi prime minister.

    Mr Khashoggi’s ex-fiancée, Hatice Cengiz, wrote on Twitter that “Jamal died again today” with the ruling.

    She – along with the human rights group Democracy for the Arab World Now (Dawn), founded by Mr Khashoggi – had been seeking unspecified damages in the US from the crown prince for her fiancée’s murder.

    The complaint accused the Saudi leader and his officials of having “kidnapped, bound, drugged and tortured, and assassinated US-resident journalist and democracy advocate Jamal Khashoggi”.

    Prince Mohammed was named crown prince by his father, King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, in 2017. The 37-year-old was then handed the role of prime minister in September this year.

    He denies any role in the killing of Mr Khashoggi.

    Justice Department lawyers said in quotes cited by Reuters that as “the sitting head of a foreign government,” the crown prince “enjoys head of state immunity from the jurisdiction of US courts as a result of that office.”

    “The doctrine of head of state immunity is well established in customary international law,” Justice Department lawyers said.

    But the Biden administration was keen to emphasise that the ruling was not a determination of innocence.

    “This is a legal determination made by the State Department under longstanding and well-established principles of customary international law,” a spokesperson for the White House National Security Council said in a written statement.

    “It has nothing to do with the merits of the case.”

    Biden fist bumps MBSReuters
    President Biden fist bumped the Saudi crown prince in July

    Saudi Arabia said the former Washington Post journalist had been killed in a “rogue operation” by a team of agents sent to persuade him to return to the kingdom.

    However, US officials said the CIA had concluded, “with a medium to high degree of certainty”, that MBS – as the prince is known – was complicit.

    The murder caused a global uproar and damaged the image of Prince Mohammed and his country.

    It also led to a major downturn in US-Saudi relations, with Mr Biden vowing to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah” while he was campaigning for the presidency in 2019.

    Mr Biden declined to talk to Mohammed bin Salman when he first became president.

    But over the summer, President Biden said he wanted to “reorient” relations, ahead of a visit to Saudi Arabia in July.

    His visit – in which he was pictured fist-bumping the crown prince – was criticised as validating the Saudi government following Mr Khashoggi’s murder.

    Sarah Leah Whitson, a spokeswoman for Dawn, wrote on Twitter that it was “beyond ironic that President Biden has single-handedly assured MBS can escape accountability when it was President Biden who promised the American people he would do everything to hold him accountable”.

     

    Source: BBC

  • Months of suffering ends after release of Britons says UK foreign secretary

    The foreign secretary, James Cleverly,  has welcomed the safe release of five British citizens who had been held as POWs in eastern Ukraine by forces backed by Russia.

    “This brings to an end many months of uncertainty and suffering, including the threat of the death penalty, for them and their families, at the hands of Russia,” he said.

    He said that was “tragically” not the case for British man Paul Urey who was captured by Russian-backed separatists in Ukraine and died in detention in July.

    “I would like to express my gratitude to President Zelensky and his team for their efforts to secure their release, and to HRH Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman and his team, for their assistance.”

    He reiterated a call on Russia to comply with international humanitarian law and not exploit prisoners of war and civilian detainees for political purposes.

  • Saudi Prince’s Mohammed Bin Salman controversial invitation to the Queen’s funeral

    Human rights activists have reacted angrily to Britain’s invitation of Mohammed Bin Salman, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia‘s Crown Prince, to the Queen’s funeral.

    According to a declassified CIA report, the crown prince gave the go-ahead for Jamal Khashoggi’s murder and dismemberment inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul in 2018.

    Although the Saudi crown prince and his administration denied this, he has since been shunned in the West and hasn’t visited Britain, until now.

    A Saudi Embassy spokesman confirmed that the prince, known as “MBS”, would be coming to London this weekend, but it was unclear if he would attend the actual funeral on Monday.

    Hatice Gengiz, the fiancée of the murdered Saudi journalist, said the invitation was a stain on the memory of Queen Elizabeth II. She called for him to be arrested when he lands in London, although she doubted this would happen.

    The pressure group Campaign Against the Arms Trade (CAAT) has accused Saudi Arabia and other Gulf monarchies of using the Queen’s funeral as a way to – in their words – “whitewash” their human rights records.

    The group estimates that since the start of the disastrous war in Yemen eight years ago, Britain has sold the Saudi-led coalition fighting there more than $23bn worth of arms.

    Scant political freedoms have also disappeared completely since MBS became crown prince in 2017, with hefty prison sentences handed down to critics of the government, even just for social media posts.

    At the same time, paradoxically, the crown prince has embarked on a massive programme of social liberalization. Cinemas and public entertainment, long banned in the Kingdom for being deemed “un-Islamic”, have reopened.

    On MBS’s orders, women are now allowed to drive and the desert kingdom has played host to international sporting and music events, including a concert by the DJ David Guetta.

    Saudi Arabia, despite its heavily-criticized human rights record, remains a staunch ally of Britain in the Gulf, where it is seen by the West as a bulwark against Iran’s aggressive expansionism.

    It buys western weapons, employs thousands of expatriate workers, hosts the annual Hajj pilgrimage, and helps to steady the oil price. All of these partly explain why international criticism of the crown prince is muted at most.