Protesters outside the Saudi Arabia consulate in Istanbul last October. Photo: Yasin Akgul/AFP/Getty Images

The body of murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi was never found because it was burned in an outdoor oven at the residence of the Saudi consul general in Istanbul, a new documentary alleges.

The film aired Sunday on Al Jazeera Arabic and included an interview with a worker who helped build the oven. The worker said that the oven “had to be deep and withstand temperatures above 1,000 degrees Celsius — hot enough to melt metal,” Al Jazeera reports.

According to the film, Turkish authorities watched the oven burn from outside the residence. They also saw bags, thought to contain Khashoggi’s dismembered body, carried inside. They said the burning took place over the course of three days. Afterward, the cover-up began: “Large quantities of barbeque meat were grilled in the oven after the killing in order to cover up the cremation of the Saudi writer’s body,” Al Jazeera learned from the Turkish authorities.

The allegation in the documentary lines up with a recent report from Anadolu, Turkey’s state-run TV station, which last month cited a police report that said Khashoggi’s body was turned to ash at the consulate.

Turkish police officially stopped looking for Khashoggi’s body more than a month after his disappearance on October 2, 2018. When the search ended on November 10, authorities had another theory about what happened to Khashoggi’s dismembered body: They thought it was dissolved in acid.