Turkish president says recordings of Khashoggi's killing given to foreign countries

Turkey has shared the recordings of the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi with Saudi Arabia, the United States, Germany, France and Britain, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Saturday.

"We gave the recordings to Saudi Arabia, and we gave them to Washington, to the Germans, to the French, to the English," Erdogan said in a televised speech before leaving for France.

The existence of such an audio recording was cited in previous press reports based on Turkish sources, in which conversations relating to the killing of Khashoggi were recorded.

According to Istanbul prosecutors, Khashoggi was choked to death immediately after he entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2 and dismembered thereafter.

Riyadh has acknowledged Khashoggi as a victim to a premeditated killing inside the Saudi mission, and announced the arrest of 18 people over their alleged connections to the killing.

In his televised speech, Erdogan said a 15-member Saudi team sent to Istanbul for the killing "surely" know who killed Khashoggi and where his body is.

When Saudi Arabia's top prosecutor Sheikh Saud al-Mojeb was in Istanbul late last month for the case, he invited his Istanbul counterpart to Saudi Arabia along with the evidence collected during the investigation.

Erdogan denounced such a gesture by the Saudi prosecutor, saying he should discuss the matter in Turkey, as Turkey is the place where the killing took place.