‘I’m Suffocating! Take This Bag Off My Head!’ Jamal Khashoggi Pleaded With Saudi Killers, Tape Said To Reveal
A Turkish journalist who says he has heard an audio recording that captures the brutal, seven-minute-long murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi has told the Middle Eastern news agency Al-Jazeera what the recording allegedly reveals to be Khashoggi’s chilling final words before a team of Saudi Arabian assassins snuffed out his life.
“I’m suffocating! Take this bag off my head! I’m claustrophobic,” the 60-year-old reporter who had become an outspoken critic of the Saudi regime headed by Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman said, according to the Al-Jazeera report. The report goes on to say that Khashoggi was murdered inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2 by means of a plastic bag pulled over his head until Khashoggi did, in fact, suffocate to death.
Khashoggi took about seven minutes to die, according to an account by the New York Post, summarizing the details published by the Turkish paper Daily Sabah. The killers were part of a 15-man Saudi hit team that flew into Istanbul that morning for the purpose of ambushing Khashoggi inside the consulate. After he died, they took another 15 minutes to methodically dismember Khashoggi’s body — first being careful to cover the consulate floor in plastic to avoid bloodstains.
Daily Sabah journalist Nazif Karaman also told Al-Jazeera that his paper planned to publish images of the bizarre instruments used to cut up Khashoggi’s body — and the paper would also release excerpts from the audio recordings that document the horrific assassination. But Karaman gave no date for when the paper would publish what is sure to be the highly explosive images and audio.
Khashoggi visited the Istanbul Saudi consulate on October 2, lured there by the promise that he would receive papers finalizing his divorce and allowing him to marry his fiancée, Turkish doctoral student Hatice Cengiz. As Inquisitr reported, Cengiz said that Khashoggi appeared to have an awareness that something might happen to him inside the consulate.
“When we arrived at the consulate, he went right in. He told me to alert the Turkish authorities if I did not hear from him soon,” she wrote, in a New York Times op-ed essay.
On Sunday, United States Secretary of State Mike Pompeo warned bin Salman that the U.S. would “hold all of those involved in the killing of Jamal Khashoggi accountable,” according to State Department Spokesperson Heather Nauert, who posted the statement to her Twitter account.
