On October 2, 2018, Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi entered his country’s consulate in Istanbul, he would never make it out alive. It’s been a little over three years since the world learned about the gorey details of the gruesome murder of Khashoggi, and despite the global outcry that followed, his killers are still on the loose.
Twenty-three days later, on Oct. 25, audio recordings of Khashoggi’s interrogation, where the journalist’s fingers were cut off by his tortuers during his interrogration, which were first obtained by Yeni Şafak, revealed beyond a shadow of a doubt Khashoggi’s fate.
What then seemed like a smoking gun that would mobilize global action and impose sanctions on Khashoggi’s killers quickly fizzled as the news cycle gradually, and miraculously, moved on from what once constituted a hot-topic issue, only to be relegated to a mere footnote in most newscasts.
Following a charade that was demed by observers to be nothing more than a sham trial, a few names have been reportedly convicted, but an assassination of this calibre could not have been executed without the approval of those high-up in the chain of command.
It remains to be seen whether securing accountability for the Khashoggi murder will again dominate news coverage as it once has but for the time being, after so many countries reversed arms sale bans imposed on Saudi Arabia following the Khashoggi assassination, it seems the West is more than happy to once again turn a blind eye to another one of the Middle East’s grave injustices that will go down in history books as a shameful example of an imperfect crime committed in broad daylight that has gone unpunished.
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