Joe Biden has been blasted after a court dismissed a lawsuit against Saudi’s crown prince - a decision taken after the US said he should receive immunity.
A federal judge in Washington DC dismissed the suit that had been brought by the fiancee of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist who was murdered in 2018 at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.
US intelligence concluded that the assassination of the reporter had been ordered by the crown prince, widely known as MBS. Saudi Arabia and MBS have denied such claims, alleging the 59-year-old had been killed by “rogue agents”.
In 2020, Hatice Cengiz, Khashoggi’s fiancée, and the Washington-based human rights organisation that the late journalist founded brought the lawsuit against MBS in 2020. They alleged that the team of assassins “kidnapped, bound, drugged, tortured, and assassinated” Khashoggi and then dismembered his body. His remains have never been found.
While he was campaigning for the White House, Mr Biden described Saudi Arabia as a “pariah nation” and said he would seek to hold it accountable.
But last week, in the latest of a series of reversals of what Mr Biden said on the campaign trail, the Biden administration announced it believed the crown prince qualified for immunity as a foreign head of government, after he was recently made the Saudi prime minister.
“Mohammed bin Salman, the Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, is the sitting head of government and, accordingly, is immune from this suit,” said a filing from the Department of Justice, while calling the murder “heinous”.
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