A French judicial official says a suspect in the killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi has been arrested in France.
The suspect was reported to have been arrested at the Roissy airport near Paris on Tuesday as he was about to board a flight French RTL radio reported.
The man, a former member of the Saudi royal guard, according to RTL, was arrested boarding a flight to Riyadh.
Khalid Alotaibi, 33, was allegedly detained by border police on the basis of an arrest warrant issued by Turkey. Mr. Alotaibi’s name first appeared in a Washington Post investigation on the ‘alleged’ hit squad, based on passport copies and travel details.
“I welcome the arrest of one of Jamals killers today in #France,” Khashoggi’s bereaved fiancée Hatice Cengiz said on Twitter. “France should try him for his crime, or extradite him to a country able and willing to genuinely investigate and prosecute him as well as the person who gave the order to murder Jamal.”
Khashoggi, a prominent critic of the Saudi government, disappeared at the Saudi Arabia consulate in Istanbul in October 2018. He had entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2, 2018 to file paperwork to marry his Turkish fiancée.
According to a BBC report, after more than two weeks of denials, Saudi Arabia eventually admitted that he had been killed within the consulate in what officials called a ‘rogue operation’ and has vowed to punish ‘those responsible.’
The suspect is in detention in France awaiting possible extradition to Turkey.
A Saudi official said in a statement that it was a ‘case of mistaken identity,’ adding that those convicted of the crime were currently serving their sentences in Saudi Arabia, according to a France 24 report.