The ending of the Jamal Khashoggi case has left a number of questions – but it was always going to

This is one of a number of events around the world this week that should give us pause, says Robert Fisk

A Saudi court recently commuted five death sentences over the 2018 murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi (AFP/Getty)

They get away with it, don’t they? The Israelis, of course, stealing more land, the cruel Arab dictators, the fraudulent Donald Trump with his absurd, childish, avaricious “peace plans” for the Middle East. But it was the Saudis again, this week, whose act of clemency to Jamal Khashoggi’s murderers – a lifting of the death sentences at the supposed request of his family – which somehow set a new template of mendacity. Other examples to follow.

I knew Khashoggi’s sons only as children and have no idea under what pressures they may have laboured for this singular act of breathtaking kindness. But it now seems that the story of the suffocation, chopping up, dismemberment and possibly chemically dissolved Khashoggi has reached its gruesome end. The murderers were medically trained, we should remember – did any of them take the Hippocratic oath? – and, according to the CIA and other worthy truthtellers, could only have been sent on their mission with the knowledge of the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohamed bin Salman.

Now we all know that Bin Salman is a man of his word. May the light never fade from his kindly eyes and may the honour of his family live for all time and may his actions always be an inspiration to his people. He denies any role in the heinous murder of the Saudi journalist in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on 2 October 2018. And he did, let us remember, take amorphous responsibility for Khashoggi’s fate on the grounds that it happened “on his watch”. Would that other world leaders shared a bit of blame for the slaughter of their citizens in such a way.