Skip to main content

Trump says Saudi crown prince doing ‘spectacular job’

Saudi Arabia Pakistani prisoners, Saudi Arabia, Hajj, Umrah,

OSAKA: US President Donald Trump praised Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on Saturday, saying he was doing a “spectacular job”, despite international outcry over the murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

The young royal has faced international pressure after US-based writer was killed and dismembered in the kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul last year.

“You have done a spectacular job,” Trump told the powerful crown prince as the pair met on the sidelines of the G20 summit, referring to him as “a friend of mine”.

But Trump ignored questions from the media about whether he would raise the journalist’s murder during his working breakfast with the prince.

In a readout provided after the talks, the White House said the pair discussed “the importance of human rights issues”, among other subjects, but gave no further details.

Riyadh has hit back against claims that Prince Mohammed bears responsibility in the murder of Khashoggi, who was killed in what Saudi authorities have described as a rogue operation.

A UN expert report has said that the “execution of Mr Khashoggi was the responsibility of the state of Saudi Arabia”, and that Prince Mohammed must have been aware of attempts to cover up the crime, including a forensic cleaning of the consulate.

The report urged a formal criminal investigation into the case.

But Saudi prosecutors say all those to blame are already on trial, citing proceedings against 11 unnamed individuals in the kingdom.

Five of those face the death penalty in the trial, which has been held secretly, with only a handful of diplomats allowed to attend.

But Trump was effusive in his praise of Prince Mohammed, who has moved to loosen some social restrictions in the kingdom but also cracked down on activists, including women pressing for the right to drive.

“It’s an honour to be with the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia… a man who has really done things in the last five years in terms of opening up Saudi Arabia,” Trump said.

“It’s like a revolution in a very positive way.”

The post Trump says Saudi crown prince doing ‘spectacular job’ appeared first on ARYNEWS.



from ARYNEWS https://ift.tt/2JdDpg3
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Trump says he urged team to ‘slow’ COVID-19 testing

US President Donald Trump said Saturday he was encouraging health officials in his administration to slow down coronavirus testing, arguing that increased tests lead to more cases being discovered. The president has claimed falsely on several occasions that surges of COVID-19 in several states can be explained by greater numbers of diagnostic tests. At his first rally since the outbreak forced nationwide shutdowns in March, Trump told the crowd in Tulsa, Oklahoma that testing was a “double-edged sword.” The United States — which has more deaths and cases than any other country — has carried out more than 25 million coronavirus tests, placing it outside the top 20 countries in the world, per capita. “Here is the bad part: When you do testing to that extent, you are going to find more people, you will find more cases,” Trump argued. “So I said to my people ‘slow the testing down.’ They test and they test.” It was not clear from Trump’s tone if he was playing to the crowd, who ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Sir Anwer Pervez, richest Pakistani British businessman, loses £432m in pandemic

Sir Anwar Pervez OBE, the founder and chairman of Bestway Cash & Carry has lost £432 million during the coronavirus pandemic to bring him down to No 50 on the richest British people list. The list has 1,000 people and is published by the Sunday Times newspaper . Pervez was at No 42 previously.  The 2020 list of the UK’s richest shows its first fall in wealth in a decade as Britain’s wealthiest people lost tens of billions of pounds in the coronavirus pandemic, the Sunday Times reported in its Rich List 2020. The newspaper, which has produced the respected annual ranking of the country’s 1,000 wealthiest people since 1989, found the past two months had resulted in the super-rich losing £54 billion ($65 billion). More than half of the billionaires in Britain had seen drops in their worth by as much as £6b, a decrease in their collective wealth unprecedented since 2009 and the financial crisis. The Hinduja brothers, who topped last year’s list with a £22b fortune, saw among ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Despite reservations about jury, Pakistan to implement FATF reforms: envoy

WASHINGTON: Despite its reservations about the fairness of the jury which is to determine Pakistan’s performance against terror financing, the government is committed to implementing its action plan for dealing with this issue, says Islamabad’s Washington envoy Asad Majeed Khan. In a conversation with a prominent US scholar George Perkovich, recorded at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington on Monday afternoon, Ambassador Khan said the actions that Pakistan had taken so far to eliminate terror financing were “reflective of the political will”. “We feel that we have done a lot. We are also clear and determined to do more,” said the envoy while responding to a question about a meeting of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) held in Orlando last week, which asked Pakistan to implement its own action plan for eliminating terror financing by October. Failing to do so could put Pakistan on a blacklist of violators and bring strict economic sanctions too. “But we w...
Post a Comment
Read more