Saudis accused of killing Khashoggi got military training in US: NYT

There is no evidence to suggest that the American officials who approved the training knew that Saudis were involved in the crackdown of dissent in the kingdom.

Four Saudi operatives involved in the killing of the Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, had received paramilitary training in the United States in the previous year under a contract approved by the State Department, the New York Times reported.

The training was provided by a security company named Tier 1 Group based in Arkansas and owned by the private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management. The training was defensive in nature and devised to protect Saudi leaders, said NYT on Wednesday.

There is no evidence to suggest that the American officials who approved the training or Tier 1 executives knew that Saudis were involved in the crackdown of dissent inside the kingdom.

The US State Department had granted the license to Tier 1 Group for paramilitary training of the Saudi Royal Guard in 2014. The training continued during at least the first year of former President Donald Trump’s term.

Louis Bremer, a senior executive of Cerberus, the parent company of Tier 1, had confirmed his company’s role in the training in 2020 in written answers to questions from Congress as part of his nomination for a top Pentagon job during the Trump administration. However, the lawmakers never received the answers because the Trump administration does not appear to have sent them to Congress before withdrawing Bremer’s nomination.

In the documents that Bremer provided to NYT, he said that four members of the Khashoggi kill team had received Tier 1 Group training in 2017, and two of them had participated in a previous iteration of the training, which went from October 2014 until January 2015.

He said that the training provided was ‘unrelated to their subsequent heinous acts.’

Bremer said the US State Department and other government agencies are responsible for vetting foreign forces trained on US soil.

Khashoggi was killed inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul in October 2018. The murder brought widespread condemnation to Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia and who has publicly denied any knowledge of the operation.