Alwaght- Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman covertly sent his top aide to the Israeli regime to purchase spyware used to track the kingdom's dissidents across the world.
Citing informed sources, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday that Major General Ahmed al-Assiri, the former deputy chief of Saudi intelligence visited Israel on a number of occasions to discuss the purchase of Pegasus, a patch of highly complicated software used for hacking and espionage.
Assiri, an aide to the crown prince, was reportedly sacked in October for playing a role in the gruesome assassination of dissident journalist Khashoggi, which is widely believed to have been ordered by bin Salman, known as MbS.
The report said that another of bin Salman’s closest aides, Saud al-Qahtani, who was also sacked over the same case, had been part of the covert Saudi outreach towards the Israeli regime.
Sources told the Journal that Qahtani, the crown prince’s media adviser, was working on softening Israeli regime’s image in the Saudi press. He was also involved in Riyadh’s purchase of spyware technology from Israeli firms.
In 2017, NSO Group, an Israeli spyware company, along with Q Cyber Technology, signed a $55 million deal with Saudi Arabia to buy the Pegasus spyware.
Earlier this month, Omar Abdulaziz, a Saudi activist based on Montreal, Canada, launched a legal action against the NSO after it was revealed that it was the hacking of his phone conversations and chats with Khashoggi that led to his assassination in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on 2 October.
