If he was using Watch 4 with LTE and if he bought it, activated it, and paired it to a sim in a European country with LTE support.. the LTE would still work when he left that country to go to Turkey. No?
Khashoggi lived in Virginia so this is still unlikely but I think it is more possible than you make it sound.
I could also see it being obfuscation as OP mentioned since it seems those reporting officially on the story from Turkey have been quick to cite evidence without showing any proof. It's very interesting all around and I've got my eyes peeled on this story.
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"While Apple does not currently explicitly list Turkey as a supported country, many users report being able to use their watch while roaming in non-supported countries.
Turkey’s carriers use the 900, 1800 and 2600 MHz LTE bands and the 2100 MHz UTMS band. All of these bands work with the Apple Watch 3 models A1889 and A1891. If roaming works on their iPhone, it would likely work on their watch unless Apple has explicitly disabled the watch itself from doing so (I’ve seen no indication they do this, and user reports to the contrary in fact). LTE is LTE after all and doesn’t care what your device is provided it conforms with the standard.
Another possibility is that Khashoggi simply made a phone call from the watch which was recorded by the other party. This removes the dependency on a data connection altogether.
What makes more sense here? That Turkey has decided to effectively admit to widespread bugging of the SA embassy (and likely all embassies for that matter)? Or that they were provided a copy of audio by Khashoggi’s fiancée? It’s far from certain, but ruling out the most likely scenario based on a support article alone seems hasty."
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Food for thought.
I’m on EE (T-Mobile and Orange consortium in the UK) which means when I roam in the EU it connects to T-Mobile and Orange which support the watch in their local countries but the roaming doesn’t work.
Also with LTE there is no sync with the phone the sync won’t work unless you are connected to WiFi it doesn’t use BT afaik it uses airdrop.
The airdrop is also anecdotally supported by the fact that my company has disabled airdrop recently when they rolled out DEP to all work issued phones since then I can’t sync the watch with my company phone.
WRT claims that they used his fingerprint to unlock the watch, that isn’t supported, but if it were within range of a paired phone and put on a wrist, it would unlock when the phone is unlocked, potentially via Touch ID.
Edit: If I were to speculate (which is all any of us can do) I would guess that the latter is how they got access to the watch, and he and his fiancé had a family iCloud account, which the files automatically uploaded to via his phone.
Also, are you suggesting WiFi from the hotel covered not only the front of but the depths of the embassy?
And I’m not really suggesting anything about the WiFi. I know remarkably little about the network infrastructure in foreign hotels and embassies. Just that there are mechanism in iOS that could feasibly make this possible, rather than immediately jumping to a Turkish surveillance cover up.
You know, Occam’s razor and all that jazz.
also do they even need cloud, can't be content of watch synced over Bluetooth? if she had access to his phone (which would make sense to not keep phone locked from her) it would make this theory plausible
though of course bugging embassy it's much more realistic and simpler