France frees Saudi after confusing him with one of the journalist’s killers

French authorities released a Saudi man, detained on Tuesday (7), after confusing him with one of the murderers of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

The 33-year-old man was detained at Paris’ Charles de Gaulle Airport before his flight to Riyadh at 9:30 am local time and was traveling on his original passport, French police told France CNN.

French radio station RTL, citing French police and judicial sources, also reported on Tuesday that the man was linked to the squad that murdered Khashoggi in Istanbul in 2018.

But the Saudi embassy in France said the detained man “had nothing to do with the case in question” and called for his “immediate release”. Hours later, on Wednesday (8), the wrongfully detained man was released, prosecutors said.

“After thorough verifications of that person’s identity, it was established that the warrant did not apply to him,” said the prosecutor general at the Court of Appeals in Paris. “At the end of his judicial detention, he was released,” added the prosecutor.

Jamal Khashoggi

Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist and Washington Post columnist, criticized Saudi Arabia and the policies of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. He was killed and allegedly dismembered on October 2, 2018, at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, by men close to the highest levels of the Saudi government and bin Salman.

On Tuesday, French media reports wrongly identified the man arrested as Khaled Aedh Al-Otaibi – one of 16 individuals banned from the United States by the State Department in April 2019 for “his roles in the murder of Jamal Khashoggi”.

(Text translated, read original in English here)