French Magistrate Opens Criminal Inquiry Into Khashoggi Killing With Saudi Crown Prince Named in Complaint

PARIS — A French investigating magistrate from the Paris judicial tribunal's crimes-against-humanity unit has opened a formal criminal inquiry into the 2018 murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman named in the underlying complaint, French prosecutors and the human-rights groups that filed the case said Saturday.

The inquiry, the first of its kind in Europe, was authorized following a May 11 ruling from the Paris Court of Appeal that overturned the French prosecutor's earlier refusal to take the case. The appeals court ruled that the complaint, originally lodged during Mohammed bin Salman's July 2022 state visit to France by the press-freedom group Reporters Without Borders, the Geneva-based legal NGO TRIAL International and Democracy for the Arab World Now — the organization Khashoggi was leading at the time of his death — was admissible under French law's universal jurisdiction over torture and enforced disappearance.

Under the order, a juge d'instruction will now investigate whether the crown prince and other senior Saudi officials can be charged with "torture, enforced disappearance and complicity in those crimes." Such investigations in France can extend over years, can compel testimony from any witness on French soil and can ultimately result in an international arrest warrant. "For the first time, a court of law has accepted that the man who ordered the dismemberment of a journalist can be investigated as a suspect in a Western democracy," said Antoine Bernard, director of advocacy at Reporters Without Borders.

Khashoggi, a Washington Post contributing columnist and a prominent critic of the Saudi government, was killed on Oct. 2, 2018, inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul by a 15-member team that flew in from Riyadh. A 2019 U.N. special rapporteur report and a 2021 U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence assessment both concluded that Mohammed bin Salman had approved the operation, a finding the Saudi government has consistently denied. Five Saudi nationals were convicted in a closed-door Saudi trial in 2020 and given prison sentences after Khashoggi's family publicly forgave them; no Saudi official has ever been prosecuted abroad.

The Saudi government has not formally commented on the French inquiry, but the state-aligned newspaper Al Riyadh ran a front-page editorial Saturday calling the case "a politicized French intrusion in defiance of the binding judicial proceedings already concluded in the Kingdom." French diplomats said privately that the inquiry would not affect a planned September visit by the crown prince to Paris for a defense-industry summit, because as a head of government he enjoys diplomatic immunity from arrest during official travel.

The ruling could have wider implications for European efforts to hold foreign leaders accountable for human-rights abuses. TRIAL International said the case would test whether universal-jurisdiction statutes adopted across the European Union since the 2000s can be enforced against sitting officials of allied governments. The group's secretary general, Philip Grant, said the next procedural step would be a series of witness interviews in Paris, Istanbul and Washington, including with Khashoggi's fiancée, Hatice Cengiz, who has campaigned for justice since his death. "This is not the end," Cengiz said in a statement from Istanbul. "This is the first time a serious judicial process has even begun."