Jashogi’s widow sues spy software company Pegasus for personal damages

June 16 (EUROPA PRESS) –

The widow of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashogi, who was assassinated in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in an operation for which the United States blamed the leadership of the Arab kingdom, has filed a personal injury lawsuit against the Israeli company NSO Group, responsible for the spy software. pegasus.

In the lawsuit, filed on Thursday before a Virginia state court and collected by the ‘Washington Post’, Hanan Elatr assures that NSO intervened his phone with this software to spy on the journalist’s movements, according to the facts revealed in 2021 by an international consortium of media and post-research from the University of Toronto and the NGO Amnesty International.

These latest investigations revealed that two mobile phones belonging to Elatr were tapped by a United Arab Emirates state security agency during a stopover that the woman made in Dubai in April 2018, four months after the journalist’s murder.

The Israeli company has not commented on the matter but its former director Shalev Hulio denied at the time that in no case was Pegasus used to spy on the journalist through his wife’s phone.

After Jashogi’s murder in October of that year, Elatr ended up under house arrest in Dubai, lost her job and ended up in hiding for 17 months in Virginia, living with acquaintances.

The lawsuit, which seeks unspecified compensation, alleges that NSO violated US federal laws that strictly prohibit the hacking of mobile phones and computers without the consent of the authorities or the user of the terminal, not to mention the “immense damage that both for the tragic loss of her husband as well as for the lack of insecurity, autonomy and financial stability” that she suffers right now.

It should be remembered that the United States Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA, directly implicated the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohamed Bin Salman, in the murder of the journalist. However, Bin Salman escaped in November 2022 from another lawsuit, the one brought by Jashogi’s fiancée, Hatice Cengiz, given her diplomatic immunity as head of state of a foreign country.