Alwaght- Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is expected to snub Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman during an upcoming summit of the G20 in Argentina.
Turkish media reports say the country’s president will not hold direct talks with the de facto Saudi rule due to the current between the two countries after dissident Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi was killed in the Arab kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul.
According to a report by A Haber, a nationwide television channel in Turkey, on Thursday, the Turkish leader does not intend to meet with the Saudi crown prince and the kingdom’s de facto ruler during the 13th meeting of Group of Twenty, which is to be held in Buenos Aires from November 30 to December 1.
The report came a few hours after the state-owned Anadolu news agency quoted Erdogan’s spokesman Ibrahim Kalin as saying that the meeting between the two “could happen.”
Khashoggi, 59, a one-time royal insider who had been critical of the crown prince recently, was killed after entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2.
Following weeks of denial of any involvement in Khashoggi's disappearance, the Saudi regime eventually acknowledged the “premeditated” murder, but has sought to distance the heir to the Saudi throne from the assassination.
A Saudi prosecutor later said Khashoggi’s body had been dismembered, removed from the diplomatic mission and handed to an unidentified “local cooperator.”
Furthermore, a recent report by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) said that the spy agency had concluded that bin Salman had been behind the gruesome crime.
Meanwhile, Turkey's English-language Hurriyet Daily News newspaper quoted CIA Director Gina Haspel that the agency had a recording of a phone call, in which the crown prince gave instructions to his brother Khaled bin Salman to “silence Jamal Khashoggi as soon as possible.”
