French police captured Tuesday a suspected member of the hit squad that murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi as he was preparing to board a flight from Paris to Riyadh, reports said.
A French police and a judicial source identified the individual as Khaled Aedh Al-Otaibi - the same name as a former member of the Saudi Royal Guard mentioned in U.S. and British sanctions lists and a United Nations-commissioned study as being implicated in Khashoggi's murder.
Authorities who detained the suspect were acting on a 2019 warrant of arrest released by Turkey, the nation where Khashoggi was killed, a police source disclosed.
Khashoggi's girlfriend applauded Al-Otaibi's arrest and said that he should face prosecution for his role in the 2018 assassination. However, the Saudi Embassy in Paris stated the arrested individual "had nothing to do with the case at hand."
"As a result, the Kingdom's embassy anticipates his swift release," the statement read.
Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist and critic of Saudi Arabia's de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, was last seen on Oct. 2, 2018, entering the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul.
Turkish officials believe his corpse was dismembered. His remains have never been found.
A March intelligence report obtained by the United States said Prince Mohammed authorized the plan to assassinate or arrest Khashoggi. The Saudi government has denied the crown prince's role and refuted the report's allegations.
A Saudi court sentenced eight people in 2020 to prison terms ranging from seven to 20 years for the murders, but none of the accused were identified. The trial was criticized by a United Nations official and human rights activists who said the tribunal failed to convict the murderers.
"This could be a watershed moment in the fight for Jamal Khashoggi's justice," former UN investigator Agnes Callamard said of the Paris detention.
Callamard identified Al-Otaibi as a member of a Saudi squad that murdered Khashoggi and mutilated his body before flying back to Saudi Arabia in her 2019 report for the UN.
Callamard, who is now director of the rights group Amnesty International, stated additional evidence was needed to establish that the man detained in France is the same individual she described in her report.
According to the police source, the detained person was being kept at a border police detention facility near Paris's Charles de Gaulle airport and would be transferred to court in the city center on Wednesday morning for an extradition hearing.
