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In an interview, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi compared the death of Khashoggi to a technology glitch.SAMUEL CORUM/Getty Images

Uber’s chief executive, Dara Khosrowshahi, drew a backlash Sunday after calling the murder of Jamal Khashoggi a “mistake” by the Saudi government and comparing the killing to the accidental death of a woman hit by a self-driving car, remarks he quickly walked back.

“It’s a serious mistake,” Mr. Khosrowshahi said in the interview with Axios on HBO, which aired Sunday after he was asked about the brutal killing last year by Saudi operatives of Mr. Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist. “We’ve made mistakes, too, right, with self driving, and we stopped driving, and we’re recovering from that mistake. So I think that people make mistakes.”

Mr. Khosrowshahi retreated from his comments last week – shortly after the interview was filmed but days before it aired – first in a phone call and then in an e-mailed statement.

“I said something in the moment that I do not believe,” he said in an e-mail to Axios on Thursday. “When it comes to Jamal Khashoggi, his murder was reprehensible and should not be forgotten or excused.”

Mr. Khashoggi, a critic of the Saudi government who wrote for the Washington Post and was a resident of Virginia, was brutally killed in October, 2018, after he entered a Saudi consulate in Istanbul. The CIA has concluded that the Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, ordered the journalist’s killing.

As Axios journalists noted in their interview with Mr. Khosrowshahi, Saudi Arabia is Uber’s fifth-largest shareholder, and Yasir al-Rumayyan, governor of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund and the recently named chairman of state-owned oil giant Saudi Aramco, sits on Uber’s board.

In the interview, Mr. Khosrowshahi compared the death of Mr. Khashoggi to the death of a woman who was struck by one of Uber’s autonomous vehicles last year.

Karen Attiah, an opinions editor for the Washington Post who worked with Mr. Khashoggi, said in a series of tweets Monday that Mr. Khosrowshahi was “running cover for the Saudi government” and comparing the murder to a technology glitch.

She said Mr. Khosrowshahi’s comments implied that “if one of @Uber’s main investors kills someone it doesn’t really matter,” adding: “A representative of a murderous regime can still keep a board seat. When you’re rich, your crimes become ‘mistakes.’ ”

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