It’s a crazy story. I won’t excuse any of those beliefs and connections. Though to be fair, I think he was friendly with Bin Laden back when they were fighting the Russians. And I still don’t know if death by dismemberment in an embassy basement is the appropriate punishment - unless I am missing something about his direct involvement in more serious crimes eg terror or murder. As I wrote before, if he was being seditious they could have extradited and tried him for that.
Curiously, he was working in the SA embassy in Washington DC until just a few weeks before 9/11. For those into 9/11 conspiracies it’s a little factoid especially if you add in the suspicion that he was also a CIA agent.
We may never know the whole truth. This could very easily be the Crown Prince overreaching, settling an old score. The stories of how he shook down many of SAs wealthiest people - well it frightened a lot of SAs wealthiest. And in some ways he was justified in that he claimed it was an anti-corruption crusade. You can’t do business in SA without taking on an SA citizen partner and some of the insiders took full advantage of that law and may have avoided paying “full tribute to the king” as it were. Rounding them up in a luxury hotel prison - it skirted western norms usually you have to be charged with a crime but in this case he just rounded them up, allegedly beat them into submission until they paid for their freedom. One of those high ranking Princes Alwaleed Talal who has made a large fortune investing in US technology and enterprise had to fork over about 1/3 of his wealth to buy his freedom.
Anyway the point is we know the Crown Prince MBS is the defacto ruler. And the buck should stop with him. But there have been killings and assassinations within those inner circles in the past. The SA king was assassinated in the mid 1970s. So we may never know if this was MBS overreaching, or some kind of move by anti-MBS forces to put in him a bad light both inside and outside in an attempt to force him out.
It also sounds like a long overdue payback. Someone targeted him, perhaps an old grudge due to his connections from long ago and perhaps exacerbated by his anti-MBS writings. And from the reports, he was worried about this kind of thing (death or rendition) as he supposedly sought assurances that the Embassy in Ankara would be a safe place to pick up his divorce papers.
As I recall, Al Waleed Talal was the guy whose strings-attached "donation" was rightfully rejected by Giuliani after 9/11.