Khashoggi’s widow files lawsuit against Israeli spyware firm NSO
The widow of murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi is suing Israeli surveillance software company NSO Group in a civil lawsuit filed in a Virginia civil court, Reuters reportedon 17 June.
Hanan Elatr Khashoggi alleges NSO technology known as Pegasus was used to spy on her messages in the months leading up to her husband’s brutal death inside the Saudi embassy in Istanbul in 2018. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (MbS) is widely viewed as responsible for ordering the killing.
Jamal Khashoggi was a well-known columnist for the Washington Post, known for his ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. He gained recognition in 1995 for interviewing Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan.
Hanan Khashoggi alleges in the lawsuit that NSO “intentionally targeted” her devices and “caused her immense harm, both through the tragic loss of her husband and through her own loss of safety, privacy, and autonomy.”
A UAE government agency allegedly placedthe NSO spyware on Hanan’s phone while she was detained and interrogated for three hours at Dubai airport in April 2018, three months before Jamal’s death.
Hanan was detained upon arrival in Dubai, when she handed over two Android mobile phones, a laptop, and her passwords to authorities.
NSO has previously denied that its technology was used to hack Jamal’s electronic devices.
A lawsuit against NSO by a friend of Jamal’s claims that his phone had been hacked by NSO, giving Saudi intelligence access to his conversations with Jamal, including communications about opposition projects.
At the time of his killing, Jamal Khashoggi was living in the United States and working to create an advocacy group called Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN).
Longtime regional analyst and former Wall Street Journal publisher Karen Elliott House explained that Khashoggi’s decision “to register in the U.S. a new political organization, perhaps funded by Saudi regional rivals, might have triggered” his killing.
Presumably, this funding came from Qatar and Turkiye, which have close ties with the Muslim Brotherhood, a group viewed as a threat by the Saudi crown prince.
In 2017, Saudi Arabia and its allies, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Egypt, cut ties with Qatar and imposed a diplomatic, trade, and travel blockade on the tiny Gulf nation due to its support for the Muslim Brotherhood.
Washington Post journalist Steve Coll, a close friend of Khashoggi, speculated that before his death that Khashoggi “broke with the movement, but he was interested in what the Muslim Brotherhood was interested in, and this was true all the way up to his murder, and it’s why he was murdered.”
Turkish government newspaper Daily Sabahclaimed that Saudi officials deliberately murdered Khashoggi, who was strangled to death after entering Saudi Arabia’s consulate in Istanbul. His body was then dismembered and put into five suitcases.
Well-known Sunday Times and Jerusalem Post journalist Melanie Phillips reported that according to her sources, a 15-man Saudi team of operatives attempted to abduct Khashoggi from the embassy to return him to Saudi Arabia, and accidentally killed him by sedating him with drugs his body did not tolerate. Phillips argues that Khashoggi was not a liberal reformer but a former Saudi intelligence operative and Islamist who was targeted after he began working too closely with Qatar and Turkiye.
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