Saudi Arabia on Thursday said it has indicted 11 suspects for the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi and prosecutors have sought the death penalty for five of the accused, AP reported. The public prosecutor exonerated Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and instead accused two senior officials of giving the orders to murder Khashoggi, AFP reported.

A spokesperson for the public prosecutor’s office denied Salman had any knowledge of the killing. While the deputy chief of Saudi intelligence, General Ahmed al-Assiri, gave the order to force Khashoggi home, “the head of the negotiating team” that flew to Istanbul ordered his murder, said the spokesperson.

Khashoggi, a vocal critic of the Saudi regime, went missing on October 2 when he was last seen entering the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul. Saudi Arabia initially claimed to have no information about his disappearance but later admitted he was killed by agents working without Riyadh’s knowledge.

Last week, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the country has shared recordings of Khashoggi’s murder with the United States, Germany, France, Saudi Arabia and Britain.

Saudi authorities reportedly used acid and other chemicals to destroy Khashoggi’s body. An unidentified official at the Turkish attorney general’s office had said that traces of hydrofluoric acid and other chemicals were found in a well at Saudi Consul General Mohammed al-Otaibi’s home in Istanbul on October 16 and 17. The report corroborates the claim of Erdogan’s advisor Yasin Aktay, who had said that Khashoggi’s body was dissolved.

Meanwhile, Erdogan’s advisor Yasin Aktay refuted comments by Saudi Arabia’s public prosecutor who claimed that Khashoggi was killed after negotiations to convince him to return to the kingdom were futile, Reuters reported. “They expect us to believe the killers carried this out on their own,” Aktay said while adding that Saudi Arabi was unlikely to find the murderers.