A Saudi Arabian court has sentenced five suspects to death in the grisly killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi at the Kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul in October 2018. Not surprisingly, crown prince Mohammed bin Salman is not one of them.

According to reports this morning, three more people were sentenced to 24 years in prison while the charges for three others on trial were dismissed. Included in those acquitted were deputy intelligence chief Ahmed al-Assiri  and his advisor Saud al-Qahtani, the royal court’s media chief.

Public relations-wise and even geo-politically, the Kingdom has been in a free fall since Khashoggi, a popular Saudi Arabian commentator and sharp critic of his country’s policies was lured into the embassy, killed, and dismembered on Oct. 2, 2018. After leaving his position as general manager and editor-in-chief of Al-Arab News, he had been a commentator for BBC and Al Jazeera  and lived for a while in the United States as a columnist for the Post. But in his last days had been in fear of retribution by Saudi authorities, having called out crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman for his crackdown on free speech and the Saudi war in Yemen, among other criticisms over the years (he had fled Saudi Arabia in 2017).

Khashoggi had been visiting the Saudi consulate to obtain documents for his marriage. He was never seen again. All signs have pointed to the highest levels of the Saudi government, and even the CIA has concurred, declaring in November 2018 that MBS had ordered the killing. But unlike the rest of the world, President Trump has pulled his punches when it has come to his friend the crown prince, and the bromance relationship with the Kingdom—including support for the war in Yemen and massive arms sales—has continued, business as usual.

MBS may not be headed for the gallows, but he knows the court of public opinion has declared him, and his country, guilty of murdering a journalist in cold blood, plus many, many more civilians in Yemen, and crimes against his own people in Saudi Arabia. He is feeling the heat as the war has been a failure, its Gulf coalition shaky, and a retributive embargo against Qatar is at a dead end as well. Even its Saudi Aramco IPO is flailing. Trump has been, in effect, supporting a weak sister, which, knowing our president, might be the final (only?) straw in breaking this friendship up for good.

Meanwhile, there is not a lot of cheering for the five suspects sentenced to death today in Riyadh. People smell a rat and a cover up. Rightly so.

Christophe Deloire of Reporters Without Borders tweeted disapproval right away today: “When Saudis sentence five to death for Khashoggi’s murder, we fear that it is a way to silence them for ever and to conceal the truth.

“We cannot consider death penalty helps to bring justice. We still expect a full accounting.”

The United Nation’s Agnès Callamard, special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, tweeted that the prosecutor refused to treat the crime as premeditated state murder.