The Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman just received the same level of protection from prosecution in the US as Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a US State Department official said in a briefing on Friday.
When questioned about the horrible murder of writer Jamal Khashoggi, in which the crown prince is a suspect, Vedant Patel, the principal deputy spokesperson for the US State Department, responded, “This is not the first time that the United States has done this. It is a longstanding and consistent line of effort. It has been applied to a number of heads of state previously.”
“President Aristide in Haiti in 1993, President Mugabe in Zimbabwe in 2001, Prime Minister Modi in India in 2014, and President Kabila in the DRC in 2018. This is a consistent practice that we have afforded to heads of state, heads of government, and foreign ministers,” he further said.
Accusations that as Gujarat’s chief minister, PM Modi’s government did nothing to put an end to the 2002 riots in Gujarat led to the US placing him on a visa ban in 2005.
The administration of US President Joe Biden revealed that Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman has legal immunity from prosecution, in connection with the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi inside his country’s consulate in Istanbul in 2018.
The US administration submitted a declaration of sovereign immunity to a federal court in Washington that is considering the lawsuit filed by Khashoggi’s fiancée, Hatice Cengiz aka Khadija Genghis, and the Democracy Organization for the Arab World Now (DAWN), a human rights organization founded by Jamal Khashoggi.
The Biden administration had said earlier that Khashoggi was killed at the direction of the Saudi crown prince.
In a filing released late on Thursday night, the Biden administration said the crown prince’s recent promotion to the role of prime minister meant that he was “the sitting head of government and, accordingly, immune” from the lawsuit.
“The United States government has expressed grave concerns regarding Jamal Khashoggi’s horrific killing and has raised these concerns publicly and with the most senior levels of the Saudi government,” the Department of Justice said in its filing, adding that the US had also imposed financial sanctions and visa restrictions related to the murder.
“However, the doctrine of head of state immunity is well established in customary international law and has been consistently recognized in longstanding executive branch practice as a status-based determination that does not reflect a judgment on the underlying conduct at issue in the litigation,” it said.
“Jamal died again today,” Hatice Cengiz, Khashoggi’s ex-fiancée, said on Twitter minutes after the news was published.
She later added, “We thought maybe there would be a light of justice from the USA, but then again, money came first. This is a world that Jamal doesn’t know and I don’t!”
