According to the “Sunday Times”, the emirate would be behind a global hacking operation against several personalities, including Michel Platini and Senator Nathalie Goulet.
by Benjamin Barthe and Rémi Dupré
In the grip of criticism on several fronts (corruption, human rights, environment), Qatar is once again found in the heart of suspicions a few days before “its” football world cup. According to a Sunday Times and the journalistic NGO The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ), Sunday, November 6, the gas emirate appears as the alleged sponsor of a global spy operation Led against personalities – investigative journalists, political leaders, lawyers – linked in one way or another to the controversial attribution, in December 2010, of the World 2022 in Qatar, or criticism of the host country of the tournament.
On the basis of confidential documents, the two British media accuse an Indian company specializing in the technique of “phishing” and its “brain”, Aditya Jain, of having carried out computer attacks against a hundred personalities.
The list of victims of hackers presented by the Sunday Times and the TBIJ is long. There are the ex-French president of the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA), Michel Platini; The President of the Swiss Republic Ignazio Cassis; The former British Echiquier Chancellor Philip Hammond; Chris Mason, BBC political editor; the French senator (Union centriste) Nathalie Goulet; Director Rokhaya Diallo; Mediapart journalist Yann Philippin; Ghanem Nuseibeh, manager of the British consulting firm Cornerstone Global; or the former Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf.
According to the two British media, Mr. Jain’s main customer is Jonas Rey, a private investigator passed by the Swiss Economic Intelligence Company Global Diligence. This company would have been hired in 2019 “to work on a project related to the World Cup”.
Aditya Jain would have recognized before two infiltrated journalists of the Sunday Times having obtained “the email data of a few high -level people in relation to the International Football Federation [FIFA]”, at the request of Jonas Rey, whose Customer was a “Gulf Country”, namely Qatar.
“no evidence”
“The allegations of the TBIJ are clearly false and baseless, replies a spokesperson for the Qatari government. The report is based on a single source which affirms that his end client was Qatar, while it does not exist No evidence in this regard. “
Among the personalities “hacked” successfully by this network of computer hackers is the British journalist of the Sunday Times Jonathan Calvert, co -author of the book The Ugly Game: The Qatari Plot to Buy the World Cup (Simon and Schuster, 2015 , not translated), which returned to the suspicions of corruption around the allocation of the 2022 World Cup. It was under its leadership that the Sunday Times had revealed, in 2019, the existence of a contract dating from November 2010 between the Al-Jazira Qatari Channel and FIFA.
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