Is there a suggested causal link here…?
I think the concern is that Wahl seems to have been a generally healthy person (although recently been feeling sick, according to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33931689), wrote a critical article about a famously hard government, received a bunch of death threats and the day after drops dead. Again, too early to reach any conclusions, I guess we'll have to wait for a proper autopsy before reading too much into it.
an autopsy report done by them would be as untrustworthy and pointless as you can get and handing over the body would be just as pointless. The regimes publicly kill people which critique even abroads and continue to bribe anyone thats willing to take their money and can give them something they wish.
None of the news can be taken seriously one way or another in a trustless society which we've long since become. While its possible that his death was a coincidence, the fact that remains is that there is a pattern of deaths whenever a person voiced critiques against these dictators.
Don't get me wrong, I worry about what you said too, but around me in life, jumping to conclusions and sticking with it regardless is much more common than what you mentioned.
Worldviews affect what upsets people. Like, duh?
Anybody that jumps to a conclusion that there is some conspiracy behind it, is being silly. Otherwise, we can just believe anything about anything, right?
— (probably not) Alexander Solzhenitsyn
"Eric Wahl said his brother had received death threats while in Qatar because of the rainbow shirt and his continued reporting on FIFA and the Qatari government."
His brother is on Twitter saying that he did not die of natural causes.