New York. Friday, 7 September 2018. Hanan Elatr, a flight attendant for Emirates, had just landed at New York’s JFK airport and was in the shuttle on her way to the hotel. Her husband of three months was meeting her there and she messaged him on WhatsApp: “Hello Jamal. I’m on the bus on my way to the hotel, where are you beautiful?”
“In the hotel lobby,” came the reply. Although they’d known one another for a decade, her short marriage to Jamal Khashoggi had so far amounted to stolen hours between trips; of two people tethered to time zones – he due to his work as a journalist; she as cabin crew for an international airline. But that night they had discussed their future; they’d keep the condo in Virginia he had owned for some time, and maybe buy a flat together in Istanbul so they could meet more frequently. The next day Khashoggi left for Washington DC, after which he would travel on to Turkey. It was the last time Elatr saw her husband alive.
What happened to Jamal Khashoggi is forever seared into the public consciousness. On 2 October, around 1pm, the 59-year-old, who for a year had been writing editorials for the Washington Post critical of the governing royal family in his native Saudi Arabia, entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. Security footage shows a smartly dressed man in grey trousers and blazer walking into the building. But Khashoggi never leaves.
He had apparently gone to the consulate to collect a document required to marry his fiancee, a young student by the name of Hatice Cengiz, despite the fact he’d married Elatr just a few months before. From the outset, there were questions still unresolved today. A Saudi official insisted Khashoggi was not in custody; Crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom’s de facto ruler, said Turkish authorities were welcome to search the building. On 6 October, Turkey concluded Khashoggi had been killed by a team of Saudi agents – an assassination squad who dismembered his body with a bone saw within two hours of his arrival. What’s more, there was audio from a bug placed inside the building to prove it.
The Saudi public prosecutor blamed the operation on a rogue band of operatives dispatched to Turkey to return Khashoggi to Saudi Arabia. They were ordered to “bring back the victim by means of persuasion, and if persuasion fails, to do so by force.” But he said “the crime was carried out after a physical altercation with the victim where he was forcibly restrained and injected with a large amount of a drug resulting in an overdose that led to his death, May Allah bless his soul … After the murder the victim’s body was dismembered … and was transferred outside the consulate building.”
The CIA, the US director of national intelligence, and the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions concluded there was credible evidence that Prince Mohammed ordered or sanctioned Khashoggi’s assassination. The Saudis have always denied he knew about or ordered the execution.
Meanwhile, Elatr was distraught, in a state of limbo, fearing she would be killed if she stayed in the Middle East.
I meet Elatr at her small apartment outside Washington DC. Most of her furniture was donated, she tells me, including a wooden dresser-desk in the tiny living room given to her by her attorney, Randa Fahmy, who sits in on our interview. Elatr has prepared food and uncovers dishes of baba ganoush, hummus, and za’atar bread. She sits opposite me on a small couch, above which is an ornate copper clock with a nazar – an eye bead believed to protect against evil – dangling beneath. It was one of two identical timepieces she bought for Khashoggi, she says. One was set to Dubai time and the other to US eastern time.
Elatr was born in Cairo but grew up in Dubai. She trained to be a journalist with Al Bayan, an Arabic language newspaper in the United Arab Emirates, but she needed a more stable job. Her father died when she was young and she felt responsible for her five siblings. She says the Gulf doesn’t have a journalistic tradition and is largely intolerant of different opinions, and so journalism as a career was insecure. She landed a job first with Gulf Air, and later with Emirates. Until Khashoggi’s murder, she had worked as cabin crew for more than two decades.
Elatr often still received invitations to journalism events, and it was at one of these, the Arab Media Forum, that she first met Khashoggi. He was well known in the Middle East; he had been fired twice from his job as editor-in-chief of Al-Watan, a daily newspaper in the kingdom, for publishing articles critical of the Saudi state’s harsh Islamic rules. Yet in between, he worked as a media adviser to Saudi rulers – a contradiction he acknowledged in a Washington Post column. “Perhaps it seems odd to be fired by the government and then serve it abroad,” he wrote. “Yet that is truly the Saudi paradox. In the starkest terms, Saudi Arabia is trying to moderate the extreme viewpoints of both liberal reformers and conservative clerics.”
As he began to spend more time in America – he held an O visa which gave him the right to work in the States and at least two of his four children were US citizens – Khashoggi became more critical of the regime. One column which said it had “complete intolerance for even mild criticism” of Prince Mohammed’s reforms was headlined: “Saudi Arabia’s crown prince is acting like Putin”. Another argued Saudi citizens should have the right to speak their minds free from the fear of imprisonment, and that women should have the same rights as men. His final column for the Post, filed on 18 September 2018, was headlined: “Saudi Arabia wasn’t always this repressive. Now it’s unbearable.”
Elatr’s eyes well up when she recounts their first meeting in 2009. She was sitting with a group of media industry friends outside the Atlantis Hotel, overlooking the Persian Gulf. Khashoggi was smoking a cigar and she noticed he wore four paper cigar bands on his finger like rings. Eventually, her friends left, leaving them alone, and the pair chatted – about education in Tunisia; about American foreign policy towards the Middle East – for hours. Before they left, they swapped numbers.
Over the years they’d bump into each other in the UAE and at various events. Elatr says Khashoggi’s life took a dramatic turn in 2016 once Donald Trump became US president. After he gave a speech voicing concern about the election of an extreme rightwing figure, Elatr says the Saudi authorities turned on him. “When he said we do not feel comfortable with Trump in the White House, it appeared like the Saudi authorities were scared [of Trump]; that it showed weakness, so they placed Jamal under house arrest. I was worried about him. He meant a lot to me. But at the time I didn’t realise I was in love with him.”
Khashoggi was detained for five or six months, Elatr says, after which the authorities lifted restrictions, encouraging him to speak out against Qatar. Relations between the Saudis and Qataris had been strained since the Arab spring, with Qatar generally supportive of the movement for reform, and Saudi Arabia in opposition. But Khashoggi refused to get involved. “This is the reason he ran away to America,” she says. When he flew to Abu Dhabi to attend a conference, he was denied entry and deported back to Saudi Arabia, she says. “They gave him the feeling he was free, but he realized very quickly that he wasn’t free at all. And he took it as a warning.”
Elatr balks at the word “dissident.” She says Khashoggi used to get upset if anyone used it to describe him. He was occasionally a contrarian, she says, and he’d defend free speech, but he wasn’t always in opposition. “Jamal was a very smart man; a very pragmatic man.”
In April 2018, Elatr flew to the US to meet him. At the airport in DC, Khashoggi handed her a bouquet of flowers and an engagement ring. She shows me WhatsApp messages they exchanged afterwards. In Arabic, Khashoggi asked her: “Are you ready to marry me without a riyal? [dowry]”
“Yes my love,” she replied, adding a smiley face emoji. “Miss you, my love. I love you, Jamal. Soon, God willing, we will be together.”But Elatr’s engagement to a man the Saudis viewed as a troublemaker meant she was now on the radar too. As she approached passport control after a flight back to Dubai, she was met by Emirati intelligence officers who confiscated her devices, blindfolded and handcuffed her, and interrogated her for 17 hours. Afterwards, she was placed under house arrest for two weeks and her family prohibited from travelling.
“I hurry to sleep … so that I can stop waiting for you any longer … you will be the happiest bride, I love you,” Khashoggi texted her on 1 June 2018. The next day, at the American Open University, in front of two witnesses, Khashoggi and Elatr were married by an imam in Virginia. She asked for a dowry of just one Saudi riyal – the equivalent of 22 pence; a token gesture showing that his love was more important than money. Photos from that day show Khashoggi dressed in a blue blazer and smart striped shirt and Elatr in a white wedding dress with a white bouquet of flowers.
Most of the short time they had together in Virginia was spent at home, listening to Arabic songs on the stereo, going out for dinner – sometimes Middle Eastern, sometimes seafood or Thai –or eating in the apartment. “I mastered the art of eastern cuisine,” she says. But Elatr says that while Khashoggi physically lived in America, she could see his heart was in Saudi Arabia. “He couldn’t see light at the end of the tunnel,” she says, adding that he’d even mentioned suicide but would never take his own life because it was a sin in their religion. Khashoggi felt he was causing problems for everyone around him – her, his children – because of his political views. “And every time he’d [think about this] he would sit down in the corner of our apartment and cry. He said: ‘I want to go, Hanan, I want to go.’”
Khashoggi refused to apply for asylum in the US and become a dissident. He loved his homeland and hoped there was another way. He had interviewed the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan back in 2016 and felt he had a good relationship with the Turkish authorities. One solution, they figured, could be for them to buy a flat in Turkey which would give him the right to apply for a passport there. If in future his relations with the Saudi authorities improved, he’d still have the option to return; if he sought asylum in the US, that door would be closed for ever.
And so Khashoggi left for Istanbul. He and Elatr were supposed to reunite in DC in early October. In a WhatsApp message on 30 September, her birthday, she shared details of her October flight times. Khashoggi replied: “Happy birthday, with love and beautiful wishes.” At the top of the WhatsApp screen she shows me, there’s a circular photo of a smiling Khashoggi. Next to that is his US mobile phone number, and below that the words: “last seen 2 Oct 2018. 14:06.”
Elatr flew to Dubai, took the shuttle to the hotel, and went to bed, oblivious that her life was about to change for ever. She woke a few hours later to messages from friends – and news on her Twitter feed – that Khashoggi had disappeared. At first, she wondered why he was still in Istanbul; he’d planned to travel on to Berlin and then to London. One news report suggested he may have been detained by the Saudis and taken by plane to Riyadh. “I thought Jamal had been kidnapped, and would face a trial,” she says, adding that she called his daughter, Noha, to ask if she’d read the news, but she had no other information. Noha Khashoggi declined to be interviewed for this story.
Elatr was in her family home in Dubai when she heard her husband had been killed. “I couldn’t stand,” she says. “I had a flight the next day and my brother carried me and put me in a car to take me to Emirates headquarters to speak to a manager. But I couldn’t talk. I took my mobile phone out and just showed her my photo with Jamal. And she said: ‘Oh my God’. My brother took me home, and for three days I couldn’t stand.”
Elatr has no idea who Hatice Cengiz is, or why Khashoggi had gone to the Saudi consulate. The two women have never spoken. Cengiz declined to talk for this story. Cengiz told a journalist she was unaware of Khashoggi’s relationship with Elatr. Meanwhile, Elatr says Khashoggi never mentioned Cengiz, a Turkish citizen. “Jamal is not a womaniser,” she says. “People misunderstand.” He had been married three times before Elatr, and she concedes he believed in polygamy – he was married to two former wives at the same time. Today she has questions to which she knows she’ll never get answers.
After Khashoggi’s death, Elatr says she was placed under house arrest in Dubai for two months because, on the advice of her Saudi lawyer, she refused to do a media interview with Al Arabiya, a Saudi state-owned TV network. The intelligence authorities wanted to know whether she intended to carry on Khashoggi’s legacy; whether she was in touch with his network. “Are you the new Jamal?” she says they asked her. In an attempt to defuse the situation, her attorney suggested she go ahead with the interview. But she says after she spoke positively on camera about Khashoggi, that interview never aired.
Elatr began to have difficulties at work. She would find herself surrounded by intelligence officers at airports. As Fahmy puts it, it wasn’t a good look for the purser of the first class cabin. In June 2020, Emirates declined to renew her contract. The following month, at Fahmy’s urging,Elatr flew to New York and claimed asylum. “It was the middle of Covid,” Fahmy, her attorney, says. “I told Hanan to get a train to Washington DC and take a cab to my house in Maryland. I hid her out there for a year and a half.”
A forensic analysis of Elatr’s mobile phone conducted in 2021 by Citizen Lab, a Canadian research firm dedicated to investigating digital espionage, found that cyber surveillance spyware called Pegasus had been installed on it. While Pegasus is made by the Israeli firm NSO, in a submission to the United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances, Citizen Lab said: “Evidence suggests that UAE officials at Dubai airport manually installed Pegasus spyware on Jamal Khashoggi’s wife’s phone in a matter of minutes.” NSO has said its spyware is sold to governments, law enforcement agencies and intelligence agencies to fight serious crime, such as terrorism. It denied its technology was associated in any way with the murder of Khashoggi – or with any of his family members, including Elatr.
In America, Elatr has slowly tried to come to terms with her new reality. The apartment she lived in with Khashoggi in Virginia was partly owned by his first wife, and she inherited nothing after his death.
In order to gain asylum in the US, Elatr had to first get hold of her marriage licence. On the asylum paperwork, it notes that because of her marriage to Khashoggi, she “suffered from past persecution in Egypt and in the UAE … The UAE intelligence services detained, interrogated, put her under house arrest, and threatened her with death … Mrs Elatr fears the Egyptian and UAE intelligence services will continue to harm [or] kill her if she is forced to leave the United States.” Her application was championed by Congressman Don Beyer and Senator Tim Kaine. In a statement, Beyer said Elatr had “the clearest case for political asylum imaginable and I am happy that I could help her get this vital protection”.
After Khashoggi’s death, his two daughters Noha and Razan wrote a column for the Washington Post, promising “his light will never fade, that “his legacy will be preserved within us”. Less than five months later, it was reported in the same paper that Khashoggi’s children had received “million-dollar houses in the kingdom” from the Saudi authorities, as well as “monthly five-figure payments as compensation for the killing of their father”.
Elatr says she feels an obligation to speak up on behalf of her husband. She wants Saudi Arabia to release all political prisoners – including Essam al-Zamil, an economist friend of Khashoggi’s who the Saudis accused of terrorism but who London-based Saudi rights group ALQST described as a “prisoner of conscience.” She’s currently working in a motel, making ends meet, but she says she has no kind of life any more. “I’m in love with my husband and every day when I get up in the morning I wonder why I’m still alive. I’m really waiting to leave, just to leave.”
Fahmy, meanwhile, hopes for a brighter future for Elatr. “I’m trying to give her hope. The first thing was to get her asylum. So now she’s safe and under the protection of the United States. Next, we’re going to get her a green card and then American citizenship.”
Fahmy says the Turkish authorities still have Khashoggi’s two mobile phones, laptop and iPad, and she strongly believes that those, too, have been infiltrated by spyware. They sued the NSO group, which owns Pegasus, in the state of Virginia, but were unsuccessful because the judge said they didn’t sue in the correct jurisdiction. Fahmy says they’re appealing against that decision. “If we win, that’s financial support for her.” Secondly, Fahmy says, they’re seeking compensation from the Saudis for murdering Khashoggi. “If we’re successful she can buy a home here; she can live the rest of her life and bring her family over, and she’ll feel some sort of comfort.”
A few years after Khashoggi was murdered, the council in Washington DC voted to rename a portion of New Hampshire Avenue, a short stretch of road near the Watergate complex, a stone’s throw from the Potomac and about ten miles from Elatr’s home. Jamal Khashoggi Way also happens to be directly outside the Saudi embassy.
