The Princess Emiratie was among the potential targets identified by “Le Monde” and its partners within the Consortium of Forbidden Stories journalists.
Le Monde
The London Family Affairs Tribunal, responsible for arbitrate a very complex divorce procedure between the Emir of Dubai, Mohammed Ben Rachid Al-Maktoum, and his sixth wife, Princess Haya Bint al-Hussein, confirmed That the latter had been spied with the Pegasus software, as shown in July, the investigations published by seventeen editors, including that of the world, which coordinated their work via Forbidden Stories.
Princess Haya had fled Dubai in 2019, and had settled in London that year with her children. Once in the United Kingdom, it launched a divorce procedure, whose multiple twists were so far in large secrets, because of the very strict privacy laws surrounding the procedures before the courts in family affairs. Over the handle.
like reveals the Guardian , the final judgments, made public on October 6, show that six phones used by the princess or his loved ones have been infected by the Spy Pegasus software , designed by Israeli company NSO Group. The discovery of this espionage has been allowed by a customer security researcher, who, although he has no connection with the case, had discovered that Princess Haya’s lawyer had been targeted by Pegasus.
In early August 2020, this computer security expert had detected traces of Pegasus on a phone used by an activist for human rights exiled in London. The analysis of a server used in the attack on this phone had allowed him to suspect the use of Pegasus to monitor an employee or even several, of the prestigious law firm Payne Hicks Beach.
The firm employs Fiona Shackleton, a famous lawyer in England and Baroness – she defended Prince Charles during her divorce with Princess Diana. And since 2019, it has been the lawyer of Princess Haya. Warned on August 5, 2020 by the security researcher that she could have been targeted, M me shackleton had also received, in the evening this same day, a surprising call from Cherie Blair, woman of the former Prime Minister Tony Blair and herself a lawyer. The company of M me Blair, Omnia Strategy, worked at the time for NSO Group, that it advised on several topics. She had explained to M me shackleton having received a call from a “very high setting of NSO Group” informing him that the company had detected that Pegasus “could have been used to monitor telephones of Baroness Shackleton and his client, his Royal Highness Princess Haya. “
Access to Pegasus cut
This information has also been confirmed in writing by NSO Group, in a letter sent to the Tribunal. The company claims to have then cut the access of “its client” – Dubai. The Tribunal also made a contradictory expertise of the phones, which concluded that they had been infected with Pegasus, and that about 265 megabytes of data had been extracted from the main telephone of Princess Haya. Dubai’s lawyers have strongly challenged this information, and multiplied the procedures to try to invalidate these findings.
The investigations published this summer by the media of the “Pegasus project” had shown that the United Arab Emirates had an intensive use of Israeli spyware, with several thousand potential targets, not to mention the use by the emirates of Other surveillance software, like those of the “Project Raven”. Among the other notable targets of this surveillance is the founder of Telegram Messaging, Pavel Durov, whose company has been installed since 2017 in Dubai.