A Turkish prosecutor asked a court on Thursday to halt the trial in absentia of Saudi suspects over the 2018 killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, and transfer the case to Saudi authorities.
The court said it would ask for the Justice Ministry's opinion on the request. It set the next hearing for April 7.
An Istanbul court put 26 Saudis on trial in absentia – including two close to the kingdom's de facto ruler Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), but no progress has been made for almost two years.
Khashoggi's fiancee Hatice Cengiz said the legal process was stalled due to Saudi Arabia's failure to cooperate because "they preferred to stay away from the issue completely instead of cooperating."
Saudi Arabia has always insisted that its legal process, carried out behind closed doors, has been completed and there is no need for further arrests. A Saudi court in 2020 jailed eight people for between seven and 20 years over the killing in a trial critics said lacked transparency. None of the defendants was named.
Following the Saudi trial, the Turkish court asked the Justice Ministry in November to send a letter to Riyadh asking about those who had been sentenced in the kingdom, to avoid the risk of them being punished twice.
The Turkish prosecutor said Saudi authorities responded by asking for the case be transferred to them and for the so-called red notices against the defendants to be lifted.
Riyadh also pledged to evaluate the accusations against the 26 defendants if the case was transferred, the prosecutor said.
The prosecutor said the request should be accepted because the defendants were foreign citizens, the arrest warrants and red notices could not be executed and their statements could not be taken, leaving the case in abeyance or suspension.
The grisly 2018 killing of Khashoggi inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul worsened already rocky relations between the two regional powers and rivals, Turkey and Saudi Arabia.
The 59-year-old was a Saudi insider-turned-critic who wrote for The Washington Post and had gone to the consulate to obtain documents for his wedding to fiancee Hatice Cengiz. He was dismembered in the consulate and his remains have never been found.
The assassination sparked international outrage that continues to reverberate, with Western intelligence agencies accusing MBS of authorizing the killing.
The murder had plunged ties between Ankara and Riyadh into a crisis. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan at the time said the order to kill "came from the highest levels" of the Saudi government though he never named the powerful crown prince.
Nevertheless, Turkey has been seeking to repair ties with regional rivals such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) over the past two years. Erdoğan had reiterated that Turkey hopes to maximize cooperation with Egypt and Gulf nations "on a win-win basis."
The president recently touched upon the normalization steps taken with Saudi Arabia and said that Ankara aims to improve bilateral relations with Riyadh.
Highlighting the recent diplomatic contact between the two countries' senior officials, he said: "We wish to continue our positive dialogue and to advance our relations with concrete steps in the coming period."
Aside from the Khashoggi incident, Saudi Arabia’s rapprochement with Israel, support of the coup in Egypt and its stance on Libya and Syria have been other points of contention with Turkey.
However, after years of looking abroad for answers, countries in the Middle East now appear to instead be talking to each other to find solutions following two decades defined by war and political upheaval.
The diplomatic maneuvering signals a growing realization across the region that America’s interest is moving elsewhere and that now is the time for negotiations that were unthinkable just a year ago.
And with the border-locking chaos of the coronavirus pandemic largely behind them, Mideast leaders are now shuffling, talking face-to-face amid a flurry of diplomatic meetings, seemingly eager to hedge their bets.
An intra-Gulf feud that saw Qatar boycotted for years by four Arab countries ended last year at Al-Ula. The closing of ranks also brought a return of realpolitik to the region, a decade after the Arab Spring movements that aimed to topple the region's autocrats.
