Three names mysteriously rubbed from US report on Khashoggi murder

The US intelligence community has replaced its long-awaited report on the murder of Jamal Khashoggi with another version that saw the names of three men it had initially identified as complicit removed.

CNN reported on Monday that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) switched the report several hours after it was published on Friday afternoon.

The first link to the report that was sent out by ODNI stopped working and was replaced with a second version, whose file name on the ODNI website includes "v2", that removed three of the men it had just announced had "participated in, ordered, or were otherwise complicit in or responsible for the death of Jamal Khashoggi".

CNN said the change went largely unnoticed amid outrage over the failure of Joe Biden's administration to impose sanctions on Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman after the report confirmed that he had directly approved the assassination.

Khashoggi, a former advocate of the Saudi royal court who later became a critic, was brutally murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2, 2018, after he entered the premises to collect documents for his planned wedding to his Turkish fiancée Hatice Cengiz.

According to Turkish officials, Khashoggi was killed and his body was cut into pieces by a 15-man Saudi squad inside the consulate.

The Washington Post, where Khashoggi was a columnist, reported in November the same year that the CIA had concluded that bin Salman had personally ordered the murder.

During his election campaign, Biden pledged to treat Riyadh as a “pariah”.

The ODNI declined to clarify why the names were originally inscribed on the list and what roles, if any, they may have had in the crime.

"We put a revised document on the website because the original one erroneously contained three names which should not have been included," an ODNI spokesperson told CNN.

ME