The Wall Street Journal uncovered on Thursday a confidential report that showed that contacts between Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and former aide at the Royal Court, Saud al-Qahtani, did not discuss late Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
WSJ said that messages sent between the Crown Prince and Qahtani, via the WhatsApp messenger app, on October 2 did not discuss Khashoggi.
The journalist was killed at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on the same day.
The confidential report was compiled by the New York-based risk consulting firm, Kroll, and commissioned by the Saudi public prosecutor, reported Al Arabiya television.
It explained that the decision to investigate the messages stemmed from western media speculation and accusations over the details of these texts.
The general prosecutor therefore, sought that they be probed by a specialized and neutral firm to put an end to the speculation, most notably the CIA’s reported evidence of 11 WhatsApp messages related to the killing of Khashoggi that were exchanged between the Crown Prince and Qahtani on October 2.
CIA officials acknowledged in the report, which was compiled in November, that the were aware of the contacts, but they did not know what they discussed.
The Kroll report based its findings on the messages found on Qahtani’s mobile phone.
None of the messages “contained clear or identifiable references to Jamal Khashoggi,” Kroll said in the report.
“Kroll did not identify indications of manipulation, deletion or alteration of the analyzed data,” according to WSJ.
The report claims that the 11 messages from the Crown Prince to Qahtani on October 2 cover relatively mundane topics, including a phone call with Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, the translation of a speech and a planned press release about solar energy.
