A former senior Saudi intelligence official said in a US lawsuit Thursday that the country’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman tried to have him assassinated in 2018, just weeks after dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered in Turkey. Saad Aljabri said Prince Mohammed sent a “hit squad” to Canada, where he lives in exile, to kill and dismember him in the same way that Khashoggi was murdered allegedly by the prince’s agents in Istanbul in October 2018. Aljabri said that Prince Mohammed wants him dead because he is close to rival prince and former Saudi security chief Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, and because he has intimate knowledge of Prince Mohammed’s activities that would sour the close relationship between Washington and Riyadh. Since 2017 when Prince Mohammed was appointed as crown prince, Riyadh tried unsuccessfully to use Interpol to gain custody of him. And he says they sent a team of agents to the United States to track him down.

Brian Hook, US pointman

on Iran hard line, quits

The envoy leading President Donald Trump’s hardline push on Iran quit on Thursday, months before an election that could reorient US policy. Brian Hook, a stalwart Republican considered one of the most powerful figures at the State Department, decided to return to the private sector, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said. Hook “has achieved historic results countering the Iranian regime,” Pompeo said in a statement. Hook will be replaced by Elliott Abrams, an intellectual architect of the 2003 invasion of Iraq who has been leading Trump’s unsuccessful campaign to oust Venezuela’s leftist president, Nicolas Maduro. Abrams will handle both Iran and Venezuela, Pompeo said.