- Saudi Crown Prince MBS says being accused of the Khashoggi murder hurts his feelings.
- "It hurt me a lot," he told The Atlantic. "It hurt me and it hurt Saudi Arabia, from a feelings perspective."
- MBS further argued his human rights were violated in being blamed for the 2018 assassination.
Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman says being accused of the 2018 assassination of journalist and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi hurt his feelings.
"It hurt me a lot," Prince Mohammed, commonly known as MBS, told The Atlantic for an extensive profile published Thursday. "It hurt me and it hurt Saudi Arabia, from a feelings perspective."
"I understand the anger, especially among journalists," he continued. "I respect their feelings. But we also have feelings here, pain here."
A team of Saudi officials kidnapped, assassinated, and dismembered Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey in October 2018.
Despite being directly implicated in Khashoggi's murder by both the US intelligence community's assessment and a 2019 United Nations investigation, MBS has consistently denied that he himself ordered the killing. In a 2019 interview with CBS News' "60 Minutes," the prince said he was "absolutely not" involved but took "full responsibility" for the killing itself.
In his interview with The Atlantic, the Crown Prince went a step further beyond saying his feelings were hurt and argued that his human rights were violated by the accusations — despite the fact that he has not faced direct consequences under international law over the Khashoggi killing.
"I feel that human-rights law wasn't applied to me," MBS told The Atlantic. "Article XI of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that any person is innocent until proven guilty."
MBS also claimed Khashoggi wasn't important enough for him to go out of his way to have killed — and if he had been, MBS would have hired more "professional" hitmen.
He asaid that if killing journalists critical of the government were "the way we did things" in Saudi Arabia, "Khashoggi would not even be among the top 1,000 people on the list."
"If you're going to go for another operation like that, for another person, it's got to be professional and it's got to be one of the top 1,000," he added.
Prince Mohammed has complained that "the Khashoggi incident was the worst thing ever to happen to me, because it could have ruined all of my plans" for reforming and modernizing Saudi Arabia, The Atlantic reported.
President Joe Biden said he would make the MBS "a pariah" over the Khashoggi murder and symbolically snubbed him by stating he would only directly engage with his father, the 86-year-old King Salman. But Biden has declined to directly punish the Crown Prince himself with sanctions or other measures.
The Biden administration has also continued to provide some support for the Saudi-led coalition engaging in a war in Yemen against Iranian-backed rebels. The prolonged war created an ongoing humanitarian crisis in Yemen.
Shortly after taking office, the Biden administration followed through with an approximately $23 billion arms deal with the United Arab Emirates, one of the members of the Saudi coalition in Yemen, that was initiated under the Trump administration.
In December 2021, Congress declined to block a $650 million arms sale directly to Saudi Arabia for its use in the war. The weapons sale was approved over the objections of some progressives and libertarians who raised concerns about human rights.