Human rights defender Sarah Leah Whitson says Turkey’s cynical U-turn on Khashoggi case is no surprise

Turkey was at the forefront of an international campaign to name and shame the perpetrators of the 2018 murder in Istanbul of Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Ankara has just dropped a case to try 26 Saudi officials who allegedly took their orders from Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The consensus is that Ankara did so to fix relations with Saudi Arabia and the powerful crown prince who it once sought to pull down. One of the main reasons for Turkey's U-turn is to drum up Gulf support for its wobbly economy, says Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of DAWN.