The New York Times in a report on Tuesday, stated that the four members of the Saudi hit squad that killed the US-based journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the year 2018 had received paramilitary training in the US, and that the training had been approved by the State Department.
Khashoggi who was a Saudi born US resident, was murdered on October 2, 2018 in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul by a team of agents sent from Saudi Arabia. He wrote for the Washington Post and also was an outspoken critic of the Saudi leadership, with which he had once been close.
The New York Times has claimed that four of those operatives received training from a private American Security Group, Toer 1 Group. And that the move was first authorized by the Obama administration back in 2014. The training furthered until the start of Trump’s reign.
The report has cited a document provided to the Trump administration in which Louis Bremer, of the parent company of Tier 1 Group, the private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management, who had applied for a senior post at the Pentagon, confirms that Tier 1 Group provided training to the Saudi agents. However, he insisted that the training was “protective in nature” and “unrelated to their subsequent heinous acts.”
He has not only confirmed in the document that the four members of the kill team had received the training in 2017, but also that two of them had already participated in a previous course from October 2014 to January 2015.
The report says that the State Department when contacted by the AFP said that it could not comment on the information in the report but has called for the “responsible use…of American military equipment and training.”
A US report released in February had stated that a 7 members of an elite unit tasked with protecting the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman were part of the hit squad that killed Khashoggi. Although the New York Times did not specify whether the four operatives trained in the United States belonged to this unit.
Khashoggi’s dead body was never found and Saudi denied the assassination claims and said that the murder had been carried by Saudi agents who acted alone.
Five Saudis were sentenced to death and three sentenced to prison terms, after a trial in Saudi Arabia, but human rights advocates criticized the punishments as aimed at lower-level agents while sparing their leaders.