A/HRC/41/CRP.1 (iii) Mansour Othman Abahussain The three officials checked into the Wyndham Hotel at 17:30. At 19:00, they went to the Consulate and remained there for several hours, returning to their hotel at 22:40. A few hours earlier, at 17:30, consular attaché ASA drove to the Belgrade Forest located some twenty kilometers away from Istanbul. 83. The same day, at 19:20, AMA spoke to Mr. Alotaibi and an employee of a tourism company about hotel options for Saudis who were planning to come to Istanbul. They discussed the proximity of several hotels with sea views to the Consulate, and requested three suites and seven rooms for three days. 84. On October 1, a Saudi official 31 contacted a Saudi national, MAA, also known as "Ghozan," who owned a farmhouse in Yalova; a city on the coast of the Sea of Marmara. He asked Ghozan how far the house was from Istanbul, and Ghozan responded “The bridge has been opened. It takes one hour and fifteen minutes to get there via highway. It takes 45 minutes from the airport.” He asked “Is there anyone there?” Gozan replied: “No, there is nobody. Just a caretaker.” He responded with, “Very nice.” 85. On October 1, at 21:48, AA, SA and another unidentified individual spoke. The Special Rapporteur could not identify who said what. One man said that “A commission is coming from Saudi Arabia tomorrow; they have something to do in the Consulate. They will have something to do on my floor in the office.” “Ok, so on the first floor? 32” “No, next to my office.” “Their work inside will take two or three days and they do not have any staff member who will take the responsibility of the office upstairs.” “All right I will be at the Consulate at 8:00.” “The name of the man who will come is Mr. Maha, and the commission is a Saudi commission; they will enter with the pass of the head of the commission.” 86. In the early hours of 2 October, at 03:30, nine additional Saudi officials arrived in Istanbul on a private plane (HZ-SK2) operated by Sky Prime Aviation, a jet charter company based in Riyadh. According to official documentation, the flight plan for plane HZ-SK2 was filed at 19:30 UTC.33 However, at 20:19 UTC it was cancelled, and re-filed at 20:23 UTC with a diplomatic clearance.34 The passengers were listed as: (i) Faad Shabib Albalawi (ii) Thaar Ghaleb Alharbi (iii) Mustafa Mohammed Almadani (iv) Badr Lafi Alotaibi (v) Turki Musharraf Alshehri (vi) Waleed Abdullah Alshehri (vii) Saif Saad Alqahtani (viii) Maher Abdulaziz M Mutreb (ix) Dr. Salah Mohammed Tubaigy This group of nine men checked into the Movenpick Hotel in Istanbul at 04:50. 87. The Turkish authorities communicated to the Special Rapporteur that “our authorities do not have any x-ray information about the belongings of the Saudi team.35” 31 32 33 34 35 https://af.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idAFKCN1NV0SB. The Saudi Consulate in Istanbul has five floors, labeled -3, -2, -1, 0, 1, and 2. The first floor refers to the floor above floor 0 (the ground floor). Flights records from the European Organization for the Safety of Air Navigation. Diplomatic clearance must be obtained for aircrafts used in military, police, customs and other state services to cross national borders. https://www.eurocontrol.int/publications/eurocontrolspecifications-harmonized-rules-euroat. Such an assertion is contradicted by Turkish journalists in their book, "Diplomatic Atrocity: The Dark Secrets of the Khashoggi Murder.” 17