The declassified intelligence report concluded that the intervention force,which operates under the prince,directed the operation against Khashoggi at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul.Khashoggi entered the consulate October 2,2018,to get papers he needed for his forthcoming marriage,and,with his fiancée waiting outside the gates,was instead met by an assassination team.

An effort by the Saudi government to issue a cover story,contending that Khashoggi had left the consulate unharmed,collapsed in days.

The Trump administration acted against 17 members of that team,imposing travel bans and other penalties. Biden,one official said,described thenew sanctions to King Salman,the crown prince’s father,in a phone call on Thursday that was only vaguely described in a White House account of the call.

But the king is 85 and in poor health,and it was unclear to administration officials how much he absorbed as Biden talked about a “recalibration” of the bilateral relationship.

In an effort to signal wider enforcement of human rights norms,Blinken is also adding a new category of sanctions,a newly named “Khashoggi ban”,to restrict visas to anyone determined to be participating in state-sponsored efforts to harass,detain or harm dissidents and journalists around the world. About 70 Saudis will be designated in the first tranche,officials said.

That review,officials said,would be part of the annual State Department human rights report. The initial bans will apply to Saudis,but officials said they would quickly be used around the world — potentially against Russia and China,and even allies like Turkey that pursue dissidents living beyond their borders.

Biden and his aides have repeatedly said that they intend to take a far tougher line with the Saudis than did former president DonaldTrump,who vetoed legislation passed by both houses of Congress to block weapons sales to Saudi Arabia.

While Congress did not have the votes to override the vetoes,Biden announced this month that he was banning billions of dollars in arms shipments to Saudi Arabia for its continuing war in Yemen,which he called a “humanitarian and strategic catastrophe”.

The release of the declassified summary of thedeclassified US intelligence findings on the Khashoggi killing on Saturday AEDT was also a reversal of Trump administration policies. Trump refused to make it public,knowing it would fuel the action for sanctions or criminal action against Mohammed.

But in the end,Biden came to essentially the same place on punishing the young and impetuous prince as did Trump and the secretary of state at the time,Mike Pompeo. While officials said there was no question he has ordered the killing and imprisonment of dissidents and other opponents,a ban would make it impossible to deal with the Saudis in the future.

He was,they concluded,simply too important to US interests to punish.

Such bans against world leaders are rare. A study by officials seeking to determine how to deal with the prince found that the US had acted against adversaries like Syrian President Bashar al-Assad;North Korea’s Kim Jong-un,Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro,and Robert Mugabe,the former prime minister of Zimbabwe. But none were heads of major allies.

The Saudi government rejected the findings. “The government of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia completely rejects the negative,false and unacceptable assessment in the report pertaining to the Kingdom’s leadership,and notes that the report contained inaccurate information and conclusions,” the Saudi Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

The New York Times,Bloomberg