The fiancee of Jamal Khashoggi said Friday that President Joe Biden had enabled Saudi Arabia’s crown prince to take more victims after the US leader met and fist-bumped the man accused of ordering the journalist’s murder.
In the form of what she imagined as a tweet by Khashoggi, Hatice Cengiz wrote to Biden, “Is this the accountability you promised for my murder? The blood of MBS’s next victim is on your hands.”
Khashoggi, a Saudi who wrote critically of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in The Washington Post, was strangled to death and dismembered in October 2018 after entering the kingdom’s Istanbul consulate to fill out paperwork to marry Cengiz, who is Turkish.
Hatice Cengiz, the fiancee of #Khashoggi, posted a mock tweet of what she thought Khashoggi would have written about the fist bump. It read: “Hey @POTUS, is this the accountability you promised for my murder? The blood of MBS’s next victim is on your hands.” https://t.co/quy71edIzn pic.twitter.com/vrEOLBuYSP
— Jens Emil Soderlund 🇩🇰 (@emil_jens) July 16, 2022
Biden had vowed as a candidate to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah” but traveled Friday to Jeddah and was pictured fist-bumping the 36-year-old de facto ruler of the oil-rich kingdom.
“The fist bump between President Biden and Mohammed bin Salman was worse than a handshake — it was shameful,” said Fred Ryan, the publisher and CEO of The Washington Post, which has demanded accountability for the death of its late contributor.
Read more: Biden goes to Riyadh: Realism may not need to trump principle
“It projected a level of intimacy and comfort that delivers to MBS the unwarranted redemption that he is seeking,” Ryan said in a statement.
AFP with additional input by GVS News Desk