Jamal Ahmad Khashoggi was killed outside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018 [GETTY]
Social media platform X has admitted on Tuesday that an ‘error’ was made leading to reinstating the account of a suspect in the 2018 murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
The account of Saud al-Qahtani, a key advisor to Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, saw an initial suspension lifted for several hours before it was applied again.
“Due to an error the suspension was originally lifted, but it has since been reinstated,” a spokesperson for X told The Guardian.
Experts told the publication that it might have been reinstated as part of its new owner, Elon Musk’s attempt to reinstate users who were suspended before or was just a technical glitch.
Qahtani’s account was permanently suspended in 2019, a year after Khashoggi’s murder.
X, known as Twitter at the time, said the account was suspended “for violations of our platform manipulation policies” and that the platform would “continue to suspend a range of accounts for other types of political spam violations in Saudi Arabia”.
Qahtani headed the Saudi Centre for Studies and Media Affairs, and the US had found that officials from the centre were part of a 15-member team that travelled to Istanbul to kill Khashoggi.
Qahtani was sanctioned by the US in 2018, but Saudi prosecutors ruled there was no evidence linking him to the murder in 2019.
Saudi journalist Khashoggi was murdered in 2018, with a US assessment finding that MbS had approved the assassination.
Khashoggi,who was once close to the royal family, had reportedly fallen out with them and had gone into a self-imposed exile in the US. There, he wrote a column in the Washington Post criticising MbS’ policies.
He was murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, where he had gone to obtain documents for his upcoming wedding. Inside the consulate, Khashoggi was brutally killed by a team of operatives and his body was dismembered. His remains have never been recovered.
