DUBAI (Middle East Eye) – The phone of the widow of murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi was targeted with military-grade Zionist spyware by a United Arab Emirates government agency, according to new forensic evidence obtained by The Washington Post.
An analysis, conducted by cybersecurity expert Bill Marczak of Citizen Lab and shared with The Post, found that Hanan Elatr’s phone had been targeted with the Pegasus spyware, created by the Zionist firm NSO Group.
It is the first indication that the Emirati government placed the spyware on a person in Khashoggi’s inner circle prior to his murder.
The incident took place in April 2018 when Elatr, a former Emirates flight attendant, was detained by UAE security agents on a return flight to Dubai.
She surrendered her two phones, her laptop, and her password, and was blindfolded and handcuffed before being taken to an interrogation center. There, she was asked all sorts of questions about her husband, Khashoggi.
While the phones were in Emirati custody, Marczak said he could see that an agent attempted to install Pegasus on Elatr’s device by manually typing in the address of a malicious website and pressing “go”. He could not determine whether the spyware was successfully installed, but noted that there was no second installation attempt.
“We found the smoking gun on her phone,” said Marczak, who examined Elatr’s two Android phones at The Post’s and her request. Emirati authorities returned them to her several days after her release.
Elatr’s phone was confiscated just after she and Khashoggi had gotten engaged and were in a long-distance relationship with Elatr based in Dubai and Khashoggi in Washington.
“I feel very devastated that I might be the tool to watching Jamal,” Elatr recently told The Post. “I want to know how many countries were watching my husband move and what were the tools used against my husband.”
In July, an international consortium of journalists, including reporters with The Post, led by the nonprofit Forbidden Stories, reported that Khashoggi’s family, friends and close contacts were among thousands of people named as alleged targets of the Pegasus spyware.
According to Forbidden Stories, Pegasus was installed on the phone of Hatice Cengiz, Khashoggi’s fiancee, just four days after he was killed inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on 2 October 2018.