Biden fist bumps Saudi prince MBS after Jamal Khashoggi killing

President Joe Biden gave a pleasant fist bump Friday to Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, whom the CIA has stated probably ordered the brutal 2018 slaying of Washington Put up columnist Jamal Khashoggi in Turkey.

Biden’s heat gesture to Bin Salman because the president exited a limousine got here forward of their assembly in Saudi Arabia, a sit-down that the president earlier claimed wouldn’t occur.

“I am not going to fulfill with MBS,” Biden stated final month. “I will a world assembly, and he will be a part of it.” 

Biden additionally had promised throughout his 2020 presidential marketing campaign to make the Saudi authorities “pay the value and make them in truth the pariah that they’re.” Biden individually shook arms with Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz, the crown prince’s father, on Friday.

Because the assembly was set to start out Friday, NBC reporter Peter Alexander shouted to Bin Salman, “Jamal Khasoggi, will you apologize to his household?”

A Saudi aide then tightly grabbed Alexander’s arm, the reporter tweeted. Alexander added that “MBS had a slight smirk” on his face after he requested the query.

Even earlier than his fist-bump with the suspected mastermind of Khashoggi’s killing, Biden was going through criticism for even touring to oil-rich Saudi Arabia.

“We really feel betrayed,” Abdullah Alaoudh, the U.S.-based chief of the Nationwide Meeting Occasion, a Saudi opposition group, told NBC News earlier this week. “We have been promised to be protected against MBS.”

Alaoudh stated Monday that Biden’s go to may assist the crown prince “get away with homicide.”

Bin Salman has denied being concerned within the brutal Oct. 2, 2018, slaying of the Saudi citizen Khashoggi within the nation’s Istanbul consulate by a group of intelligence operatives linked to the prince.

American officers have stated that Khashoggi’s physique was dismembered with a bone noticed.

“Completely not,” Bin Salman instructed the CBS Information present “60 Minutes” when requested if he ordered the killing.

“This was a heinous crime,” he stated in that interview. “However I take full duty as a frontrunner in Saudi Arabia, particularly because it was dedicated by people working for the Saudi authorities.”

Whereas the Saudi authorities at first denied any involvement in the killing, it later claimed that the intelligence group unintentionally killed him whereas making an attempt to extradite him in opposition to his will to Saudi Arabia.

Earlier than his killing, Khashoggi was dwelling in exile in the US so as to write with out the chance of being jailed by his house nation.

Biden final week revealed an op-ed in The Washington Post — Khashoggi’s newspaper — justifying his go to to Saudi Arabia.

“From the beginning, my goal was to reorient — however not rupture — relations with a rustic that is been a strategic companion for 80 years,” Biden wrote in that article, which mentions the slain journalist by identify as soon as.

“I do know that there are various who disagree with my choice to journey to Saudi Arabia,” the president wrote. “My views on human rights are clear and long-standing, and elementary freedoms are all the time on the agenda after I journey overseas, as they are going to be throughout this journey, simply as they are going to be in Israel and the West Financial institution.”