RNA - "The West's double-standard criteria on human rights can be witnessed here as many western countries have shown sensitivity over the murder of the journalist and are apparently pursuing it but they have kept silence on the crimes like what is happening in Yemen and no voice is heard from them," Amoli Larijani said, addressing the high-ranking judiciary officials in Tehran on Monday.
He noted that killing of Khashoggi further revealed the terrorist-nurturing identity of Saudi Arabia, and said, "Saudi Arabia first covered the crime with the help of the West, but they were forced to admit it recently, claiming that a number of rogue killers have committed the crime, to exonerate their corrupt government."
After two weeks denying involvement in his disappearance, Saudi Arabia said early on Saturday that Khashoggi, a critic of the country’s de facto ruler Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, had died in a fight inside the building.
Within hours a senior Saudi official told Reuters that a team of 15 Saudi nationals sent to confront Khashoggi had threatened him with being drugged and kidnapped and then killed him in a chokehold when he resisted.
Then on Sunday Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir said that while he did not know exactly how Khashoggi had died, his killing was a “rogue operation” in which Saudi individuals had exceeded their authority.
According to Fars News Agancy, an adviser to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Monday dismissed a Saudi assertion that Khashoggi died in a fight in the kingdom’s Istanbul’s consulate, one of several accounts of the journalist’s disappearance to have emerged from Riyadh.
“One cannot help but wonder how there could have been a ‘fistfight’ between 15 young expert fighters ... and a 60-year-old Khashoggi, alone and defenseless,” Yasin Aktay wrote in a column in Turkish newspaper Yeni Safak.
“It explains no aspect of the incident according to all the information reached - on the contrary, it leads to even more questions,” Aktay, who is also a close friend of Khashoggi, noted.
“The more one thinks about it, the more it feels like our intelligence is being mocked,” he wrote.
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