One of the questions that surfaced over the weekend was how they managed to smuggle the body parts out of Istanbul's Atta Turk Airport on a private Gulfstream jet. The person who oversaw the entire operation and is close to Bin Salman is Maher Abdulaziz Mutreb who has a diplomatic passport and can take stuff out of the country using Diplomatic Pouch without inspection.

There's size restriction on the diplomatic pouch therefore they had to cut his body into small pieces and fit them in the boxes.

I was wondering about that. So, now it makes sense why they cut him up into pieces. I wonder though why the two planes that were carrying the hit squads made stops in Cairo and Dubai. The planes could have easily made it nonstop to Saudi. Was it to distract attention from their final destination? Doesn't seem like a good tactic. But that's all I could think off. Maybe they unleaded the body parts at those airports? That would be too risky though. 

Another thing that stands out from the NY Times article is how the hit squad threatened the Saudi consul. Generally speaking, high ranking Saudi diplomats are members of the extended royal family. so for these guys to threaten the consul general shows that these were some seriously high ranking intelligence people.

If you google the 2 private jets call signs HZ-SK1 and HZ-SK2, you get some interesting flight info. The Gulfstream GIV SP has a flight range of less than 8,000 kilometers based on the payload. The roundtrip distance from Riyadh to Istanbul is around 5,000 kilometers, depending on the route. So they might have stopped in Cairo and Dubai for refueling, where they have an arrangement and contract.

Interesting