Who Was Jamal Khashoggi? A Saudi Insider Who Became an Exiled Critic

Jamal Khashoggi was one of Saudi Arabia’s most prominent journalists. He had been living in self-imposed exile in Virginia after leaving Saudi Arabia in 2017. Then, after entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2, 2018, he disappeared. Turkish officials said he was killed inside. After repeatedly denying it, the Saudi government acknowledged that Khashoggi died there. Initially, Saudi officials said he was killed after “discussions” turned physical, an account European officials and some U.S. lawmakers cast doubt on. Eventually, the kingdom’s public prosecutor said he had been killed by a team of Saudi agents sent to convince him to come back to Saudi Arabia. Authorities charged 11 people in the case and in December 2019, five were sentenced to death for the murder.

Khashoggi, 59, was a leading critic of Saudi Arabia’s current leadership, sharing his views via platforms including opinion columns in the Washington Post that were translated into Arabic. His journalism career included stints in Afghanistan, where he met and followed the rise of al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden in the 1980s. He was deputy editor-in-chief of the Saudi newspaper Arab News at the time of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the U.S., which made him a valuable source for foreign journalists seeking to understand what drove some Muslims into such actions. In the 2000s, he was twice fired from his post as editor-in-chief of the Saudi Al-Watan daily newspaper, which under his leadership ran stories, editorials and cartoons critical of extremists and the waylamv in which the country enforced its religious values. (Saudi newspapers are privately owned but government-guided, and the government approves and can fire top leadership).