Khashoggi was leading secret double life when he was killed: podcast
Murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi was living a double life with two different women when he was executed — including one he had secretly married, according to a new podcast.
The Washington Post columnist was tortured and then dismembered on Oct. 2, 2018, inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, where he’d gone to get documents he needed to be able to marry fiancée Hatice Cengiz.
At the time, Cengiz had no idea that Khashoggi was also seeing Egyptian flight attendant Hanan El-Atr — nor that he had secretly married her in Virginia just four months earlier, she told Yahoo! News’ “Conspiracyland.”
“He told me when he proposed to me, there is no one in his life,” Cengiz told the investigative podcast.
El-Atr said she was equally in the dark about Cengiz — whom Kashoggi met while El-Atr was detained for 10 days by Emirati security agents who grilled her about her relationship with him, she said.
El-Atr said she and the journalist became an item when she started visiting him in his home in Washington, DC, in the early months of 2018 while she made twice-monthly trips there for work.
When he proposed soon afterward, he texted her to say that she “will be the happiest bride.”
“I throw myself at you, kiss you and delight you. I take out a watch or a necklace or perfume I bought for you to delight you,” he texted her, according to the episode titled, “A Tale of Two Women.”
They married in an Islamic ceremony performed by an imam in a northern Virginia mosque on June 2, exactly four months before his murder, according to court records reviewed by Yahoo News.
However, they never got a civil marriage license, meaning the union was not legally binding. The groom did buy her two rings for a total of $2,000, the podcast said, citing receipts from a local jewelry store.
But that spring and summer, he also started making frequent flights to Istanbul to see Cengiz, texting El-Atr that his “sister is here in Istanbul” to explain the trips, she told the podcast.
Not long after proposing to her, he also got down on one knee to Cengiz and bought her jewelry including a necklace and earrings.
He lied not only to Cengiz but even her father when he started grilling him about his intentions and his background, Cengiz recalled.
“My father knows very well the Arabs get married more than [once] at the same time,” said Cengiz. “And then he asked him, ‘Are you sure you’re not married?’ It’s a little bit of a sensitive point for my father.”
Her husband-to-be insisted, “I’m not married. I’m divorced,” she told the podcast, referring to an earlier marriage.
Friends said it was not the only part of the journalist’s life that he kept a secret.
“If somebody sits across from you … and tells you that Jamal told them everything, they are 100 percent lying to you,” says Mohammed Soltan, an Egyptian American human rights activist who collaborated with Khashoggi.
“Jamal compartmentalized, he told different people certain things about his life. He gave nobody a full view of his life.
“He kept all of it with himself, and he gave different people the things that they needed to know. So, I had no idea about Hanan,” he admitted.
However, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman — whom US intelligence blames for Kashoggi’s brutal murder — appeared to be learning plenty about the journalist who was a harsh critic of his rule.
When one of his sources told him that the Saudis had penetrated their communications, Khashoggi reportedly replied, “Oh gosh … May God help us.”
