 The department also said that the realm did not punish those accused of committing serious human rights abuses.The Middle East correspondent of "The Independent", Patrick Cockburn, wrote that the killing of Jamal Khashoggi "is by no means the worst act carried out by Saudi Arabia since 2015, though it is much the best publicised.... Saudi leaders imagined that, having got away with worse atrocities in Yemen, that any outcry over the death of a single man in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul was something they could handle".