A Turkish official said Friday that police were investigating the possibility that Jamal Khashoggi’s remains were taken to a forest near Istanbul — or to another city — after the journalist was murdered inside the Saudi consulate.
Two vehicles belonging to the diplomatic mission left the building on Oct. 2, the day the Washington Post columnist vanished after walking inside, the official said.
One of the vehicles was driven to the Belgrade Forest while the other headed to the city of Yalova, across the Sea of Marmara from Istanbul, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
It was not immediately clear if authorities had already searched the areas.
Turkey believes the dissident journalist was tortured, murdered and dismembered inside the consulate by a 15-member “hit team” with ties to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman.
The Saudis have dismissed those reports as baseless but have yet to explain what happened to Khashoggi, who wrote critically of Prince Mohammad’s rise to power.
President Trump said Thursday that it “certainly looks” as though Khashoggi is dead, and that the consequences for the Saudis “will have to be very severe” if they are found to have killed him.
Meanwhile, CNN reported Friday that Turkish officials suspected within hours of Khashoggi’s disappearance that he had likely been killed.
Intelligence officials rushed to the Istanbul airport, where a private Saudi plane was waiting to take off, to try to determine whether he had been abducted or whether his body was being whisked out of the country, the news outlet reported.
Several sources told CNN how Turkish officials responded after Khashoggi’s fiancée, Hatice Cengiz, sounded the alarm just before 5 p.m. Oct. 2 — 3½ hours after he entered the consulate.
An adviser to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told the network he’d received a call from Cengiz and immediately called government officials and intelligence officers.
The adviser, Yasin Aktay, said that a little before 6 p.m., he called the Saudi ambassador in Ankara, Waleed Al Khereiji, who told him he had not heard anything about Khashoggi.
Turkish intelligence officials decided to review an audio-visual feed from inside the Saudi consulate — a feed whose existence Ankara has not publicly acknowledged, sources told CNN.
The feed provided evidence of an assault and a struggle that had occurred earlier in the day inside the consulate. Police at the airport were then ordered to search a Saudi-chartered Gulfstream at Istanbul’s Ataturk airport.
The plane was one of two jets that had flown from Riyadh earlier on Oct. 2, carrying the Saudis allegedly involved in the deadly operation. The other aircraft had departed before investigators arrived, according to CNN.
Seven Saudi passengers were already waiting at the airport, according to a police account viewed by CNN, including one with a diplomatic passport.
Their suitcases had already been X-rayed and the officer who performed the scan told officers from the intelligence agency MIT that it would have identified any body parts inside the baggage.
Intelligence officers dressed as airport workers searched the interior of the plane, found nothing suspicious and allowed the passengers to board. The plane took off at about 11 p.m. local time.
With Post wires