Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman isn't attending Queen Elizabeth II's funeral after human rights activists protested

• Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is not attending Queen Elizabeth II's funeral after protests.
• Prince Turki bin Mohammed al Saud will be representing Saudia Arabia instead.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was dropped from attending Queen Elizabeth II's funeral after criticism from human rights activists, according to Reuters.

The de-facto leader of Saudi Arabia was controversially invited to the late monarch's funeral, a move that was strongly condemned.

However, a UK Foreign Office source told Reuters that the prince will no longer be attending.

Saudi Arabia is instead being represented by Prince Turki bin Mohammed al Saud, the Foreign Office confirmed to Insider.

The Saudis decided to make the change, Reuters reported.

On learning the crown prince had been invited to the funeral, Hatice Cengiz, who was Khashoggi's fiancée, tweeted, "The crown prince should not be allowed to be part of this mourning and not be allowed to stain her memory and use this time mourning to seek legitimacy and normalization."

The brutality of the Saudi justice system and the brutal killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi have made Prince Mohammed a controversial figure.

Khashoggi, a Saudi national who was a columnist for the Washington Post, was murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October 2018.

US intelligence believes Prince Mohammed, often referred to as MBS, was directly involved in Khashoggi's killing, according to a declassified report released by President Joe Biden's administration last year.

"We assess that Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman approved an operation in Istanbul, Turkey to capture or kill Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi," said the report, provided by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

In January 2020, UN experts called for an "immediate" investigation into the crown prince, after publishing a report suggesting that he was behind the hacking of then-Amazon CEO and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos' personal phone.

The authors suggested the crown prince could have been targeting Bezos because The Washington Post's stories critical of the Saudi government including by Khashoggi.