Turkey’s main opposition leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu paid a visit to the headquarters of The Washington Post on Wednesday to offer his condolences for the murder of one of the newspaper’s contributors, Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, at the kingdom’s Consulate General in İstanbul in 2018, Voice of America reported.
The 59-year-old journalist was killed inside the Saudi Consulate General in İstanbul on Oct. 2, 2018 in a gruesome murder that shocked the world. Khashoggi had gone to the consulate to get papers for his upcoming marriage to his Turkish fiancée.
Republican People’s Party (CHP) leader Kılıçdaroğlu is currently on a six-day visit to the United States where he is meeting with businesspeople, civil society representatives, students and prominent scientists.
On Wednesday, the fourth day of his visit to Washington, D.C., Kılıçdaroğlu visited the headquarters of The Washington Post and met with David Hoffman, a Pulitzer-Prize winning contributing editor to The Post.
“I paid a visit to The Washington Post to express our condolences for the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi, who was a valuable columnist for their newspaper. The Khashoggi assassination was committed at the Saudi Arabian Consulate in Istanbul. With this terrible assassination, not only freedom of thought, but also humanity suffered great wounds,” Kılıçdaroğlu tweeted.
He also criticized a Turkish court’s decision in April to halt the trial in absentia of 26 suspects linked to the killing of Khashoggi and its “transfer” to Riyadh, saying that the move was a great insult to Turkey’s sovereignty.
The İstanbul court had begun the trial in 2020, when relations were tense between the two Sunni Muslim regional powers. But with Turkey desperate for investment to help pull it out of an economic crisis, Ankara has sought to heal the rift with Riyadh.
Turkey attracted a barrage of criticism from local and international rights groups when the İstanbul court decided to halt the trial of the suspects linked to the killing of Khashoggi.
Kılıçdaroğlu, who last visited Washington in 2013, will return to Turkey at the end of his visit on Thursday evening.