The United Arab Emirates has sentenced an American citizen and the former lawyer of Jamal Khashoggi — the dissident Saudi journalist who was killed at Saudi Arabia’s consulate in Istanbul in 2018 — to three years in prison on charges of money laundering and tax evasion.
Emirates says arrest of Asim Ghafoor, an American citizen, was coordinated with the US to ‘combat transnational crimes’; attorney will be deported
The lawyer, US citizen Asim Ghafoor, will be deported, the UAE’s state-run WAM news agency reported late Saturday, without saying when. The Abu Dhabi Money Laundering Court also ordered that Ghafoor pay a fine of $816,748 stemming from his in absentia conviction.
The UAE framed Ghafoor’s arrest as a coordinated move with the US to “combat transnational crimes.” Emirati state-run media said American authorities had requested the UAE’s help with an investigation into Ghafoor’s alleged tax evasion and suspicious money transfers in the Emirates.
The autocratic Gulf Arab sheikhdom announced the prison sentence a day after Washington-based human rights watchdog Democracy for the Arab World Now, DAWN, raised the alarm about Ghafoor’s arrest from Dubai International Airport.
DAWN said that its board member, a civil rights attorney based in Virginia who had represented Khashoggi and his fiancée, Hatice Cengiz, was in transit to Istanbul on Thursday to attend a wedding when plainclothes Emirati security agents scooped him up and sent him to an Abu Dhabi detention facility before he could change planes.
Ghafoor had no knowledge of any case against him and had transited through Dubai without incident less than a year ago, DAWN said.
The US Embassy in Abu Dhabi did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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The sentencing came the day after US President Joe Biden left the region and returned to Washington.
Biden was criticized for greeting Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman with a fist bump, despite a CIA report presented to Biden that found that the crown prince had ordered the hit on Khashoggi, in which Saudi operatives killed the journalist and dismembered his body.
Biden told journalists he had raised the Khashoggi case “at the top” of his meeting with the crown prince, adding that he’d made clear “what I thought of it at the time and what I think of it now.” An official familiar with the matter said that bin Salman retorted by raising the killing of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh.
