New Delhi:
Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi has backtracked from the statement where he called the murder of a Washington Post columnist a "mistake." Khosrowshahi on Monday tweeted,” There’s no forgiving or forgetting what happened to Jamal Khashoggi & I was wrong to call it a “mistake.” As I told @danprimack after our interview, I said something in the moment I don't believe. Our investors have long known my views here & I'm sorry I wasn’t as clear on Axios (sic)."
Khosrowshahi had compared the murder of Khashoggi to the death of a pedestrian hit by one of his company's autonomous vehicles. Last year, Uber’s self-driving car hit and killed a woman in Arizona.
According to a report, “Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund, known as the Public Investment Fund, holds about $1.9 billion worth of Uber stock, making it the company's fifth largest stakeholder. Its managing director, Yasir Al-Rumayyan, sits on Uber's board.”
Khashoggi, a US-based writer who annoyed the Saudi Crown prince through critical columns in The Washington Post, was strangled to death on October 2, 2018 and dismembered after entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to handle wedding paperwork, according to US and Turkish officials. Khashoggi visited the consulate to secure the divorce papers needed to marry his fiancee but did not make it out alive.
Secret tapes have revealed Saudi operatives suspected of killing journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the country’s Istanbul consulate cracking joking before his arrival. Helena Kennedy, a British lawyer assisting the UN probe into Khashoggi’s death, said recordings she had heard from inside the kingdom’s mission in Turkey referred to the Saudi critic as a “sacrificial animal.”
“There was a discussion about ‘will the body and the hips fit into a bag this way’?”, she told BBC television’s Panorama documentary programme broadcast on Monday night.
Kennedy said Turkish bugs in the Saudi consulate picked up a forensic pathologist suspected of cutting up Khashoggi’s body as saying, “I often play music when I’m cutting cadavers. Sometimes I have a coffee and a cigar at hand.”
The pathologist also says, “’It’s the first time in my life that I’ve had to cut pieces on the ground—even if you are a butcher and want to cut, he hangs the animal up to do so’,” she added.
“They speak about waiting for Khashoggi to arrive and they say, ‘Has the sacrificial animal arrived?’. You could hear them laughing, it’s a chilling business.”
