Riyadh

US President Joe Biden who is in Saudi Arabia raised the 2018 murder of Jamal Khashoggi during his meeting with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on Friday and said that he believed the Saudi leader was responsible for the US-based journalist's death.

"I raised it at the top of the meeting, making it clear what I thought of it at the time and what I think of it now," Biden said in a speech after hours of meetings with the Saudi Crown Prince in Jeddah.

"I said, very straightforwardly, for an American President to be silent on the issue of human rights is inconsistent with who we are and who I am," Biden added.

However, responding to the questions raised by the media, Biden later said that the Saudi Crown Prince told him he was not "personally responsible" for Khashoggi's murder.

"I indicated I thought he was," Biden said. "He said he was not personally responsible for it, and he took action against those who were responsible."

Jamal Khashoggi was found dead inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018. He was a dissident journalist who wrote a weekly column for the Washington Post critical of the Saudi government. After falling out of favour his country's government he was living in exile in the United States before his death under mysterious circumstances.

Biden received criticism earlier on Friday when he was photographed fist bumping the Saudi Crown Prince, who the US intelligence community concluded approved Khashoggi's 2018 murder.

Notably, he also expressed optimism that Saudi Arabia would take steps to boost the global oil supply in the coming weeks, which had been viewed as a major goal of the trip given high domestic gas prices globally due to the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine.

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He will also attend a joint conference on Saturday with the leaders of the Gulf Cooperation Council member states, as well as leaders from Jordan, Egypt, and Iraq.