Hanan Elatr attended the visit of Saudi Mohammed bin Salman to the White House in November. The prince, well received in Washington, is accused of having ordered the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. He was Elatr’s husband. “I live in hell,” he said Leaf. “There is no justice.”
Disappointed, Khashoggi’s widow also saw President Donald Trump assert that the prince was not involved in the crime, which contradicts the US investigations themselves. Trump also said Khashoggi – who wrote for the US newspaper Washington Post – was a “controversial” person who “many didn’t like”.
Elatr is now preparing a series of offensives in the courts. The most immediate of these is the demand that the Trump administration make public the transcript of its phone call with Salman in 2019, shortly after Khashoggi’s death. Elatr also wants to force the Saudi government to accept responsibility, apologize and compensate her for her husband’s death.
The phone call is the last element of the case. In November, Democratic Rep. Eugene Vindman told reporters he read the transcript of that conversation when he served on the National Security Council. Vindman said the content was “quite disturbing” and that it would “shock people if they knew what was said” that day.
The MP did not reveal the details, as the information is confidential. “But everything indicates that there is something we need to know,” Elatr says. “This could constitute important evidence to facilitate prosecution.”
Elatr plans to soon launch a legal campaign in several countries, including France, the United Kingdom, Canada, Norway and Turkey. This also does not exclude exploring legal avenues in Brazil.
The cases are based on the fact that, according to the expertise of cybersecurity experts, his phone has been monitored since 2018, with the probable aim of spying on Khashoggi. Elatr worked as a flight attendant and suggests that the crime was therefore committed in different territories during her travels.
Jamal Khashoggi was the editor of a newspaper critical of the Saudi regime. In 2017, he went into exile in the state of Virginia, from where he continued to write against the monarchy.
Ruled by an alliance of conservative and religious forces, Saudi Arabia is accused of serious human rights violations. Prince Salman, known as MbS, has taken a series of opening steps that his critics say are merely cosmetic changes.
In October 2018, Khashoggi went to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to regularize his documents. It never came out. Investigations, including those by US intelligence, suggest that Salman was involved in ordering the assassination. It is suspected that the journalist was drugged, killed and dismembered there. Neither the body nor personal effects were ever found.
“He was an innocent journalist,” says Elatr, moved. “He only had ideas and words. He had no interest. He chose to go into exile to continue to defend his vision for the future of Saudi Arabia.”
Since then, Elatr has spent his days trying to understand what happened that day. “I have a lot of questions and no answers,” he said. His thesis is that Saudi leaders wanted to send a message to the country’s dissidents. “They made this horrible decision so that everyone would hesitate to criticize the regime.”
As she prepares her case, Elatr says she plans to continue speaking publicly about her husband so he is not forgotten by the courts. He particularly hopes that journalists, Khashoggi’s professional colleagues, will not forget him.
Elatr takes a certain risk in so openly opposing the regime that she accuses after all of having dismembered her husband. After being briefly detained in the United Arab Emirates, she fled in 2020 to the United States, where her asylum request was accepted.
“I expect to be murdered at any moment,” she said. “But I have already lost my love, who was like a twin brother to me, my Adam. I lost my job, my family. Now I have nothing to lose.”
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