US President Donald Trump calls Khashoggi killing a 'total fiasco'

Turkish police crime scene investigators leave an underground car park, after looking for possible clues into the killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Photo / AP

US President Donald Trump says he will be briefed tomorrow by US officials looking into the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi Arabian agents.

Trump said that afterwards: "We'll know pretty much everything there is to know."

He called the killing of Khashoggi "a total fiasco" and says Saudi Arabia never should have thought about killing the dissident Washington Post contributor.

Trump said: "Once they thought about it, everything else they did was bad too."

Trump repeated the denials by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman that he knew of the plot before it was carried out.

Trump also called the events after Khashoggi's death one of the "worst cover-ups".

He added: "They had a very bad original concept" and it was "carried out poorly."

Saudi Arabia has claimed that Khashoggi died accidentally in a brawl at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul on October 2.

But Turkish officials say a 15-men team tortured, killed and dismembered the writer and say Saudi officials had planned the killing for days.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says the Trump Administration is revoking the visas of some Saudi officials implicated in the death.

Global outrage

Meanwhile, facing global outrage over the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, Saudi officials are now admitting two key points - the latest twist in the kingdom's evolving efforts to explain Khashoggi's death.

They say that the journalist was targeted inside the kingdom's consulate in Turkey and a body double was on hand to aid in a cover-up.

This new version of events — which was described to AP by two Saudi officials — comes three weeks after the kingdom said Khashoggi left the consulate on his own and insisted that Turkish claims he was killed by an assassination squad were unfounded.

Now Saudi officials tell AP they did in fact send a team to Turkey that included a forensics expert and a member whose job was to dress in the 59-year-old writer's clothes and pretend to be him.

But they still insist that his death was an accident.

This account attempts to distance Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman from the killing, even though officials linked to the 33-year-old ruler have been implicated.

But the fact that the Saudis are acknowledging some aspects of the account provided by Turkish authorities suggests that the kingdom is feeling intense global pressure, including from US President Donald Trump and members of Congress, some of whom have called for cutting off arms shipments and imposing sanctions.

There was no way to corroborate the Saudi account, which paints the suspects as rogue operators.

It also contradicts many observers who believe the complex scheme that led to Khashoggi's death could not have occurred without the knowledge of the crown prince, who controls all major levers of power in the kingdom with the blessing of his father, King Salman.

"It would have likely had the approval of the Saudi Government," said Robert Jordan, a former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia during President George W. Bush's Administration.

- AP