Saudi journalist may have recorded his own torture and death
A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com
You are now subscribed
Your newsletter sign-up was successful
Turkish security officials have reportedly obtained audio and video recordings proving missing journalist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered last week inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul — and the audio files may have been recorded by Khashoggi himself.
The journalist activated the recording function on his Apple watch before entering the consulate, a Turkish newspaper reported Saturday, citing "reliable sources in a special intelligence department." Khashoggi's "interrogation, torture, and killing were audio recorded and sent to both his phone and to iCloud," the report says. Some files were deleted from the watch, the paper noted, but only after the sync completed.
Some tech experts have expressed skepticism that Turkish authorities could have obtained recordings from Khashoggi's watch without access to the watch itself. The device usually needs to be within a certain proximity of a linked iPhone to upload content to the cloud. Also questionable is the paper's report that Saudi interrogators could have unlocked the watch using Khashoggi's fingerprint, as that is not a capability Apple's product description mentions.
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Saudi Arabia has denied involvement in Khashoggi's disappearance.
A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com
Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
