Khashoggi pal suing Israel firm

A friend of slain U.S. journalist Jamal Khashoggi is suing an Israeli cybersecurity firm, accusing the company of selling spyware to the Saudi Arabian government that it used to hack into his cell phone and snoop on conversations he had with Khashoggi before his death.

Attorneys for Omar Abdulaziz, who lives in exile in Canada, filed the lawsuit against NSO Group in Tel Aviv on Monday.

A prominent Saudi dissident with hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers, Abdulaziz says he clicked on a link sent to his cell phone in June 2018 that exposed his text messages and other communications to Saudi authorities using NSO Group’s spyware technology.

The 27-year-old said he believes the intercepted information was a “crucial factor” for the Saudi assassins who killed Khashoggi (photo) inside his home country’s consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2.

Since the cell phone hack, Abdulaziz also says he has faced increased harassment by Saudi authorities, including the detention of family members at home.

NSO Group — which has faced similar accusations in the past as its software has been found to be used by repressive governments spying on journalists and human rights activists — rejected Abdulaziz’s suit as “completely unfounded” and claimed there’s “no evidence that the company’s technology was used. We take an extremely scrupulous approach to the licensing of our products — which are only provided after a full vetting and licensing by the Israeli government.”

Abdulaziz’s suit comes one day after it was widely reported that the CIA has obtained evidence Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman communicated extensively with a key suspect in Khashoggi’s death shortly before his murder.

The suspect, Saud al-Qahtani, was slapped with U.S. sanctions over allegedly masterminding the plot to kill and dismember Khashoggi. inside