Nearly six years after the brutal assassination of Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi inside Saudi Arabia’s Istanbul consulate, a French investigating judge will move forward with a formal probe into the killing, multiple sources confirmed to Agence France-Presse on Saturday. The long-awaited investigation follows a years-long legal battle launched by global human rights and press freedom organizations that have accused Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, of direct involvement in the murder.
Khashoggi, a contributing columnist for The Washington Post and reporter for Middle East Eye who was known for his critical reporting on the Saudi regime, was killed by Saudi agents shortly after he entered the consulate on October 2, 2018. His body was dismembered, and no remains have ever been recovered. In 2021, a declassified U.S. intelligence report publicly concluded that bin Salman had personally ordered the assassination, a finding the crown prince has repeatedly denied, though he has acknowledged the killing occurred on his watch. During a 2025 White House meeting with former U.S. President Donald Trump, he described the incident as “a huge mistake.”
The legal push in France began in July 2022, when two organizations — Switzerland-based NGO Trial International and Democracy for the Arab World Now (Dawn), an advocacy group Khashoggi founded just months before his death — filed an official criminal complaint accusing bin Salman of complicity in torture, enforced disappearance, and premeditated murder, claiming he directly “ordered the assassination by asphyxiation.” Reporters Without Borders (RSF) later joined the complaint. For years, France’s public prosecutor’s office blocked the investigation, arguing the NGOs’ claims were legally inadmissible. That changed last week, when the Paris Court of Appeal ruled the complaints meet the threshold for investigation, noting that “the possibility that the case could be classified as a crime against humanity could not be ruled out” before a formal probe is completed.
The case has now been assigned to an investigating judge with specialized expertise in prosecuting crimes against humanity. The judge’s core mandate will be to examine whether the assassination was part of a coordinated, state-level campaign by the Saudi government targeting political dissidents, which would qualify as a widespread or systematic attack against a civilian population under international criminal law.
While Dawn was unable to gain formal status as a civil party to the proceedings, the organization welcomed the court’s ruling as a critical milestone for accountability. “The crime committed against Jamal Khashoggi is an abominable crime decided and planned at the highest levels of the Saudi state, which had a journalist executed who was a dissenting and independent voice,” said Emmanuel Daoud, legal counsel for RSF. Henri Thulliez, a lawyer representing Trial International, emphasized that France is legally obligated to pursue allegations of torture and enforced disappearance when suspects are present on its territory, adding that “there should no longer be any obstacle to opening a judicial inquiry into the atrocious crime against Jamal Khashoggi.”
The 2018 killing sparked global condemnation from world leaders, press freedom advocates, and human rights groups, who widely criticized Saudi Arabia’s internal domestic trial over the incident as a sham. The closed-door 2018 trial sentenced five defendants to death and explicitly cleared bin Salman of any involvement, a outcome that rights groups dismissed as an “antithesis of justice” and “a mockery.” For years after the killing, bin Salman faced informal diplomatic isolation among Western leaders, though that has gradually eased in recent years amid shifting geopolitical priorities.
This development marks the first formal judicial investigation by a Western country into the case, opening a new chapter in the multi-year push for accountability for Khashoggi’s killing.