Bahrain: opponents like loyalists in viewfinder of Pegasus

Human rights activists and lawyers, but also members and loyalists of the plan, have been targeted by Israeli spyware.

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In the hands of an ill-intentioned government, PEGASUS spyware is a formidable weapon often used against civil society, lawyers, journalists and human rights activists. But if the powerful people think sheltered from this mouchard, they are mistaken: it is also used against the allies of customer regimes, or even against some of their members. Media investigations involved in the “Pegasus project” have already shown it in Morocco or Kazakhstan, and new revelations on the use of Pegasus attest it now in a new country: Bahrain.

The Bahrainy NGO Red Line for Gulf , based in London , reveals Friday, February 18 that the telephones of three eminent members of the Kingdom of the Kingdom of the Persian Gulf have been infected in 2021 by the Spy Pegasus software, sold by the Israeli company NSO Group. More surprisingly, an analysis of part of the 50,000 numbers selected by NSO Group clients for a possible hacking, that Forbidden Stories and Amnesty International consulted and shared with sixteen media, carried out with the help of Red Line for Gulf, reveals that a Pegasus customer has also been interested in dozens of telephones close to the plan, including loyalist parliamentarians, senior officials and even members of the royal family.

Pegasus is very powerful spyware. Once installed on a phone, it not only allows to listen to conversations and access a real-time geolocation, but also to download all the message history contained on the phone, including those exchanged via secure applications as signal or whatsapp. In the case of relatives of the targeted plan, failing that they have been able to carry out technical analyzes on their phones, it is impossible to say if the interest of Pegasus’s Bahraini client has effectively translated by hacking.

Lawyers and members of civil society
Of the three members of the civil society, on the other hand, have been able to confirm such a hacking is the lawyer Mohammed Al-Tajer. His phone was hacked three times between 2 and September 27, 2021, only one week after the publication of a survey revealed that he had been spying with another monitoring software.

Mohammed Al-Tajer is not any Bahraini lawyer: known for his fight for democratic reforms and for defending many Bahrainic activists, he was involved in the vast protest movements that inflamed The country in February 2011, and which had been violently repressed by the police. It has been the subject of many pressures: In addition to the infection of his phone, in 2011, by a competitor software from Pegasus, an intimate video of him and his wife has been broadcast on the internet.

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/Media reports.