During a meeting in 2014, exiled former Saudi Arabia official Saad Aljabri alleged in a recent interview that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman discussed employing a Russian poison ring to murder former King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud.
Young Prince Brags That He Could Kill King Abdullah
In a recently published article in Newsweek, after bin Salmon deposed Mohammed bin Nayef as heir to the monarch in a 2017 palace coup, Aljabri escaped to Canada to live in exile. He was previously a key Saudi intelligence officer and advisor to Mohammed bin Nayef, the nephew of King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud.
Bin Salman, commonly known as MbS, and bin Nayef met in 2014, and the young prince boasted that he could murder King Abdullah to clear the way for his father's leadership, according to a former top Saudi security source who spoke with a news outlet on Sunday.
Aljabri said, "And he told him, 'I want to assassinate King Abdullah. I get a poison ring from Russia. It's enough for me just to shake hands with him and he will be done. That what he says. Whether he's just bragging or, but he said that and we took it seriously," according to a published report in Business Standard.
Read Also : Saudi Arabia Royal Family Argues Amid Israel's Peace Agreements With Bahrain, United Arab Emirates
Aljabri Claims That He Still Has Copies of the Video of the Planned Assassination
Bin Nayef was the chief of Saudi intelligence at the time while bin Salman was a guard for his father's royal court but had no formal function in the government. Aljabri said that he saw a videotape of the meeting and that copies of the film are still available today.
Meanwhile, Aljabri used the interview to warn Prince Mohammed that he had a film that shows much more royal secrets as well as some information on the US. Scott Pelley, a journalist for "60 Minutes," was shown brief, silent footage. If Aljabri is murdered, the video may be published, according to a published article in ABC News.
The claims leveled by Aljabri are the latest effort to put pressure on the 36-year-old crown prince. Two of Aljabri's adult children are being held in Saudi Arabia as pawns in an attempt to get their father to return to the country. If he returns, Aljabri could face the same fate as his former boss, Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, the once-powerful interior minister who was removed from the line of succession by the current crown prince in 2017.
Scandals Emerge in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
Bin Salman, Saudi Arabia's 36-year-old heir to the kingdom, was characterized by Aljabri as a "psychopath with no empathy" who doesn't feel the emotion and has never learned from his mistakes. Since bin Salman's ascension to power, the monarchy has been rocked by a series of scandals that have been criticized by Democrats and a rising number of Republicans.
Needless to say, Jamal Khashoggi, a prominent opponent of the Saudi government and a Washington Post journalist, was killed at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October 2018. In the aftermath of the tragedy, conflicting narratives developed about who was to blame for his death. According to the Saudi authorities, Khashoggi was assassinated by a group of renegade operatives who were attempting to convince him to return to the kingdom. The spies, according to Turkish sources, were deployed by high Saudi government officials.
