Insider previously reported that Jeffrey Epstein's private jet flew from Paris to somewhere over the Arabian Peninsula on November 7, 2016. The jet returned to Paris 48 hours later.

Newly located flight data, discovered by the journalist Eric Rosenwald, shows that Epstein's Gulfstream GV-SP landed in Riyadh at King Khalid International, the main airport of the Saudi Arabian capital.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, with whom Epstein has claimed to be close friends, was in Riyadh at the same time, holding meetings with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.

Bezos and MBS did not answer questions about whether they met the accused sex trafficker around the same time. Bezos attended at least two dinners with Epstein, in 2004 and 2011.

The presence of Epstein's jet in Riyadh provides additional evidence of the financier's ties to the Saudi kingdom.

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In August, Insider reported that Jeffrey Epstein's private jet was spotted over the Arabian Peninsula on the eve of Election Day 2016. The available flight data was incomplete, however, leaving the Gulfstream's final destination an open question. Now we have the answer.

According to the journalist Eric Rosenwald, who analyzed aviation data collected by the flight-tracking service Plane Finder, Epstein's jet landed at King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh, the capital and largest city of Saudi Arabia, at 6:35 p.m. local time on November 7, 2016. The flight pattern provides significant new evidence of Epstein's rumored ties to the kingdom and its ruling family.

Insider discovered the flight from Paris to the Arabian Peninsula in a dataset maintained by ADS-B Exchange, a crowdsourced website that aggregates aviation signals from all over the world. ADS-B refers to the protocol's technical name, automatic dependent surveillance–broadcast.

Rosenwald filled the gaps in the ADS-B Exchange dataset, mainly over the Arabian Peninsula, by combining them with Plane Finder's own data.

"For about six months, I got a notification every time that his plane was spotted in Plane Finder's system, and I knew it was in Riyadh on Election Day," Rosenwald told Insider. "I didn't know what to do with it."

Epstein's private jet landed in Riyadh on November 7, 2016. Shayanne Gal/Insider

Epstein's jet was in Riyadh at the same time as Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman.

There isn't enough information to precisely reconstruct the 48 hours Epstein's jet spent in Riyadh, and Rosenwald's data doesn't show whether Epstein was a passenger on either leg of the flight. Such information likely turned up in a recent subpoena issued to Epstein's pilots, but has not yet been made public. Still, it is reasonable to suppose that Epstein was flying aboard his own private jet.

Two people of note were in Riyadh at roughly the same time.

The first person is Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz , who at the time served as the kingdom's Minister of Defense and Second Deputy Prime Minister. On November 8, the state-owned Saudi Press Agency reported that bin Salman, also known as MBS, and his father, the Saudi king, bestowed Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joseph F. Dunford, Jr., with the Order of King Abdulaziz, a civilian award for distinguished service to Saudi Arabia.

, who at the time served as the kingdom's Minister of Defense and Second Deputy Prime Minister. On November 8, the state-owned Saudi Press Agency reported that bin Salman, also known as MBS, and his father, the Saudi king, bestowed Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joseph F. Dunford, Jr., with the Order of King Abdulaziz, a civilian award for distinguished service to Saudi Arabia. The second person is Jeff Bezos, the billionaire co-founder and CEO of Amazon. On November 9, the day Epstein's jet returned to Paris, MBS held an unrelated meeting with Bezos, several Amazon executives, and two Saudi ministers. The Saudi Press Agency said they "discussed fields of cooperation and investment opportunities available according to the Kingdom's Vision 2030," the crown prince's signature economic initiative.

Because the precise timing of the MBS-Bezos meeting is uncertain, I could not determine whether Epstein's jet and Bezos were in Riyadh at precisely the same time. The Saudi Press Agency said it took place on November 9, but not at which hour. Yet an overlap seems far more likely than not. A direct flight from Seattle to Riyadh takes about 14 hours and 30 minutes. And if you and a small group of your close colleagues, all based in Seattle, planned to meet a dignitary in Riyadh on a Wednesday, you would likely schedule the flight there for Monday or Tuesday.

Epstein claimed to be long-time friends with MBS, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia.

Last year, Epstein told a New York Times reporter that he personally knew and routinely played host to MBS. The same reporter encountered a full-length portrait of the Saudi prince on a wall in Epstein's New York City mansion. And Bezos has broken bread with Epstein at least twice — in 2004 and again in 2011 — at so-called "billionaires dinners" hosted by the Edge Foundation.

One noteworthy attribute that Epstein and his apparent friend MBS share is a history of being accused of blackmail. In January, Bezos' chief of security accused the Saudi kingdom of gaining unauthorized access to Bezos' personal messages and photos. According to The Daily Beast, the Saudis planned to blackmail Bezos, who purchased The Washington Post in 2013, as punishment for his paper's aggressive coverage of their own columnist, Jamal Khashoggi, whom Saudi agents assassinated in Istanbul last year.

The Saudis denied the blackmail operation, and others blamed the brother of Bezos' girlfriend for obtaining and selling their correspondence to the National Enquirer (whose publisher, American Media Inc., has its own murky ties to Saudi Arabia). But the allegations closely match a certain thread of speculation about the source of Epstein's titanic wealth. His case is laden with indications, some more obvious than others, that he engaged, or attempted to engage, in high-stakes blackmail.

Did Epstein encounter MBS or Bezos in Riyadh?

These circumstances raise an obvious question: If Epstein was indeed in the Saudi capital, did he meet with MBS or Bezos on November 7, 8, or 9 of 2016?

Insider asked Amazon, the Saudi government, and Epstein's estate whether any of the men crossed paths in Riyadh. We also asked the Saudis and the estate if Epstein and MBS personally knew each other.

A spokesperson for Amazon declined to answer detailed questions sent via email.

An unnamed spokesperson for the Center for International Communication, a state-owned agency that coordinates media coverage of the Saudi government, said they would pass our questions to the "proper entities." We did not receive a response by presstime.

Epstein's attorney, Reid Weingarten, did not acknowledge requests for comment.

The flight to Riyadh is the latest piece of evidence concerning Epstein's connection to Saudi Arabia.

The trip to Riyadh offers some of the most significant evidence to date of Epstein's ties to the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, a relationship that could propel further speculation about his potential role in the world of intelligence.

Former US Attorney Alexander Acosta reportedly told members of the Trump administration that he declined to press federal sex trafficking charges against Epstein after being told — it's unclear by whom — that "Epstein 'belonged to intelligence' and to leave it alone." Acosta has mocked coverage of these remarks, which were first reported by Vicky Ward of The Daily Beast, but has never denied making them. He did, however, resign as Secretary of Labor over his handling of the Epstein case.

After his arrest in July, prosecutors revealed that Epstein possessed a counterfeit Austrian passport, bearing Epstein's photo but a different name, whose stamps showed travel to and from Saudi Arabia (along with France, Spain, the United Kingdom). The passport listed Epstein's residence as Saudi Arabia, too.

Shortly after Epstein's death in August, a friend and attorney for Ghislaine Maxwell, his long-time companion and accused co-conspirator in sex trafficking, staged a photograph of Maxwell reading The Book of Honor: The Secret Lives and Deaths of CIA Operatives at a Los Angeles In-N-Out Burger.

And late last week, the journalist Edward Jay Epstein recounted an April 2013 meeting with the financier (who is unrelated) at his Upper East Side mansion:

In the anteroom, I had seen photos of Epstein with Saudi prince Mohammed bin Salman and Emirate prince Mohammed bin Zayed, some in beachwear and with snorkel gear." I asked, "Are these clients in the Middle East?" He answered that some were, and that he was planning to buy a house in Riyadh, since that was becoming the new center of international finance.

We asked several Emirati agencies whether Mohammed bin Zayed, the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, was friends with or had a connection to Jeffrey Epstein. None of those agencies, including the UAE Embassy in Washington, acknowledged our requests for comment.

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