France Releases Man Mistaken for Khashoggi Murder Suspect

France on Wednesday released a man who had been arrested a day earlier on suspicion of involvement in the 2018 murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi after authorities concluded that the arrest was a case of mistaken identity. The man, a Saudi national named Khalid al-Otaibi, was arrested by French border police at Charles de Gaulle Airport outside Paris as he was about to board a flight to Riyadh. A man by the same name is one of 26 being tried in absentia in Turkey for carrying out Khashoggi’s murder at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul. The suspect in Paris was arrested on the basis of a Turkish arrest warrant issued in November 2018 but “in-depth verifications to determine the identity of this person have enabled us to establish that the warrant was not applicable to him,” the chief prosecutor in Paris said in a statement. The Saudi Arabian Embassy in Paris late on Tuesday demanded the arrested man’s immediate release, saying he “has nothing to do with the case in question.”