Abdulkadir Selvi, a columnist for Hurriyet, cited anonymous officials on Thursday as saying the CIA had a tape of Crown Prince Mohammed telling his brother Khaled bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the US, that Khashoggi needed to be silenced immediately.

Selvi wrote: “It is said that the crown prince gave an instruction to silence Jamal Khashoggi as soon as possible and this instruction was captured during the CIA wiretapping. The subsequent murder is the ultimate confirmation of this instruction.” He called the tape a “smoking gun.”

Selvi then called for an international investigation that “can reveal more jaw-dropping evidence, as CIA has more wiretapped phone calls at hand than the public knows about.”