The Jamal Khashoggi affair exposes a moral vacuum at the foreign office, says Michael Miller , while Tom Lynham recalls the brutal treatment of another dissident writer. Linda Rhead wants Britain to boycott Saudi Arabia now

The Foreign Office response to criticism of their late and weak reaction to Jamal Khashoggi’s apparent murder/assassination totally misses the point (UK must condemn Saudi violence, say five main opposition parties, 22 October).

Their statement that the key test is “whether there is a clear risk that items subject to the [export] licence might be used to commit a serious international humanitarian law violation” is akin to Trump’s stance that they can do what they like as long as they still buy US arms. It implies that Saudi torture and murder are OK as long as our weapons aren’t used. How reprehensible does a regime have to be for moral and ethical considerations to take precedence over capitalist greed?

Michael Miller

Sheffield

• Interesting to note the allegation that the assassins cut off Jamal Khashoggi’s fingers (Analysis, 18 October). It’s a characteristic of the infantile brutality that drives paranoid autocrats. The Albanian writer Musine Kokalari spent her life fighting for democracy and campaigning against the oppressive regime of Enver Hoxha.

She was publicly humiliated, tortured, imprisoned in hard labour camps and finally denied treatment for terminal cancer. After the fall of communism, Musine’s relatives exhumed her body so that it could be reburied next to her mother. They discovered that prior to interment the authorities had bound her wrists with barbed wire to ensure that even in death she would never write another word.

Tom Lynham

London

• “Britain announced yesterday it would provide further aid to tackle malnutrition among Yemen’s children” (Report, 17 October). Instead of, or perhaps as well as, this belated and empty gesture, maybe our politicians should be taking action to remove their support for, and sale of arms to, the Saudi regime which is creating the problem.

Linda Rhead

Hampton, London

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