A couple of week's ago Saudi Arabian journalist and prominent critic of the government Jamal Khashoggi disappeared but this wasn't a magic show and he didn't suddenly reappear on the other side of a stage. It turned out that this was more like the magic trick where they cut someone in two or make them disappear and it was Saudi spies running the show so it was less Houdini and more Whodunnit and they've stayed quieter than the one in Penn & Teller that doesn't say anything.

There are two stories being proposed. One is the Official Saudi one in which Jamal entered the Saudi Embassy in Instanbul, got into a fight and was accidentally killed in the process. They didn't tell us sooner because they were embarrassed, like in those children't story where a vase gets broken and everyone learns an important lesson about telling the truth. Except in this case someone died, if it's a children's fairytale then it's some kind of twisted version of the three little pigs where the wolf ends up in the brick house feasting on barbecue ribs.

There's also the Turkish version of events, in which private jets landed with officials from Riyadh who set about dismembering Jamal with a surgical bone saw and they have evidence in the form of a recording from his Apple iWatch. The Saudi spies presumably went on to synch the device to the bottom of the Bosphorus.

Whatever happened I'd rather focus on the fact that this is a classic example of one death being a tragedy while millions dying is a statistic. Much has been said about the war in Yemen and a criminal justice system that puts ISIS to shame in terms of brutality, but you can also take a look to the other participants. It's one hundred years since over a million other people went missing in Turkey, except the were Armenian and Istanbul would prefer you forgot about that story.