US President Donald Trump on Tuesday (November 18) defended Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman at the Oval Office after the kingdom’s de facto leader was asked about the US intelligence agencies’ finding that he had approved the 2018 killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.“You’re mentioning somebody that was extremely controversial,” Trump said, referring to Khashoggi. “A lot of people didn’t like that gentleman that you’re talking about. Whether you like him or didn’t like him, things happen, but he knew nothing about it. And would you leave it at that? You don’t have to embarrass our guest by asking a question.”Here is a look at who Khashoggi was, what happened to him, and what the US intelligence agencies found about his death.Who was Khashoggi?Khashoggi was a veteran journalist and opinionmaker who went to college in the United States and, from the late 1970s, was a friend of Osama bin Laden whom he met as a reporter in Afghanistan.He travelled with Osama, and wrote one of the first profiles of the al-Qaeda founder in 1988. But he remained opposed to Osama’s Islamist radicalism — and despite having been a member of the Muslim Brotherhood at one time, became increasingly secularised subsequently.In 2003 and in 2007, Khashoggi was appointed editor of the Saudi newspaper Al Watan, but lost his job on both occasions after publishing criticism of religious extremism. In 2015, he launched a TV network, Al-Arab, which was shut down within days. Despite being an “insider” closely associated with the power elite, he remained “the kind of journalist who annoys the authorities”, his colleague at The Washington Post, David Ignatius, wrote in 2018.As these “authorities” came to increasingly represent Mohammed bin Salman after 2015, Khashoggi’s criticism found a focused target. According to Ignatius, he thought the Crown Prince was an “impulsive hothead”. In 2017, Khashoggi moved to Washington DC, where he continued his criticism of the Prince through his column in The Washington Post.Story continues below this adAlso in Explained | Why India shouldn’t be worried by Saudi-Pak dealWhat happened to Khashoggi?On October 2, 2018, Khashoggi visited the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to pick up a document he needed under Turkish law to marry his fiancée — Hatice Cengiz — a Turkish woman. Cengiz accompanied him to the entrance of the consulate, and Khashoggi was last seen on CCTV footage entering the building at 13:14 local time. After the columnist did not return for about 10 hours, Cengiz raised an alarm.For more than two weeks, Saudi Arabia repeatedly denied any knowledge of Khashoggi’s disappearance. However, on October 20, the Saudi government said a preliminary investigation had found that Khashoggi died during a “fight” after resisting attempts to return him to the kingdom.On November 15, the Saudi Public Prosecutor’s office released additional information about Khashoggi’s death. After a physical altercation with a “negotiations team” sent to Istanbul by the Saudi deputy intelligence chief to bring back the columnist, Khashoggi was injected with a lethal dose of a sedative. His body was then dismembered, according to Saudi prosecutors.The prosecutor’s office said that five people had confessed to the murder, adding: “[The crown prince] did not have any knowledge about it”.Story continues below this adWhat did the US intelligence agencies find?On February 26, 2021, the US President Joe Biden administration declassified an intelligence report, which had concluded that Mohammed bin Salman had approved the operation to capture or kill Khashoggi.The report’s assessment was based on the prince’s “control of decision-making in the kingdom, the direct involvement of a key adviser and members of [the prince’s] protective detail in the operation, and [his] support for using violent measures to silence dissidents abroad, including Khashoggi”.It also found that Salman’s “absolute control” of Saudi Arabia’s security and intelligence organisations made it “highly unlikely” that Saudi officials would have carried out an operation like Khashoggi’s murder without the prince’s approval.