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Israeli Software Helped Saudis Spy on Khashoggi, Lawsuit Says

A symbolic funeral prayer for the murdered Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul last month.Credit...Huseyin Aldemir/Reuters

LONDON — A Saudi dissident close to the murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi has filed a lawsuit charging that an Israeli software company helped the royal court take over his smartphone and spy on his communications with Mr. Khashoggi.

The lawsuit puts new pressure on the company, the NSO Group, and on the government of Israel, which licenses the company’s sales to foreign governments of its spyware, known as Pegasus. More broadly, the suit also calls new attention to Israel’s increasingly open alliance with Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf monarchies.

Saudi Arabia and its allies like the United Arab Emirates have never recognized the Jewish state but have quietly found common cause with it in opposition to Iran. Since the Arab Spring uprisings, Israel and those monarchies also appear to have found an alignment of interest in defending the established Arab order.

The lawsuit, filed in Israel by the Montreal-based Saudi dissident Omar Abdulaziz, follows parallel suits by journalists, activists and others charging that the NSO Group improperly helped the governments of Mexico and the United Arab Emirates spy on their smartphones even though the individuals had no criminal records and posed no threat of violence.

The human rights group Amnesty International has also recently accused the NSO Group of helping Saudi Arabia spy on a member of the organization’s staff. Amnesty said last week that it was considering legal action after the Israeli defense ministry rejected a request to revoke NSO Group’s license to export its spyware.

“By continuing to approve of NSO Group, the Ministry of Defense is practically admitting to knowingly cooperating with NSO Group as their software is used to commit human rights abuses,” said Molly Malekar, the programs director of Amnesty International’s Israeli office.

In a statement on Sunday, the NSO Group said its products were “licensed for the sole use of providing governments and law enforcement agencies the ability to lawfully fight terrorism and crime.”

Contracts for use of its software “are only provided after a full vetting and licensing by the Israeli government,” the company said, adding: “We do not tolerate misuse of our products. If there is suspicion of misuse, we investigate it and take the appropriate actions, including suspending or terminating a contract.”

The spyware allows its customers to secretly listen to calls, record keystrokes, read messages, and track internet history on a targeted phone. It also enables customers to use a phone’s microphone and camera as surveillance devices.

Because of those sweepingly invasive capabilities, Israel classifies the spyware as a weapon. The company must obtain approval from the Defense Ministry for its sale to foreign governments. Saudi Arabia paid $55 million last year for its use, according to Israeli news reports.

Mr. Abdulaziz, the plaintiff of the new lawsuit, is a 27-year-old Saudi who sought asylum in Canada and lives in Montreal. In the aftermath of the Arab Spring uprisings, he had become popular among Saudis for online videos and social media commentary criticizing the rulers of the kingdom for their authoritarianism. The consulting firm McKinsey & Company identified him as an influential driver of dissent on social media.

Over the last two months, he has also gained international attention because of his friendship and collaboration with Mr. Khashoggi, a Saudi exile living in Virginia who wrote columns for The Washington Post.

Mr. Khashoggi was killed and dismembered in October in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. American intelligence agencies and many Western officials have concluded that Saudi Arabia’s day-to-day ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, authorized the assassination. He has denied authorizing the killing, and Saudi officials have said that a team of agents sent to retrieve Mr. Khashoggi decided on their own to kill him instead.

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Killing Khashoggi: How a Brutal Saudi Hit Job Unfolded

An autopsy expert. A lookalike. A black van. Our video investigation follows the movements of the 15-man Saudi hit team that killed and dismembered the journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

There were 15 of them. Most arrived in the dead of night, laid their trap and waited for the target to arrive. That target was Jamal Khashoggi, a prominent Saudi critic of his country’s government and its young crown prince. Since his killing in Istanbul, Turkish media has released a steady drip feed of evidence implicating Saudi officials. Weeks of investigation by The Times builds on that evidence and reconstructs what unfolded, hour-by-hour. Our timeline shows the ruthless efficiency of a hit team of experts that seemed specially chosen from Saudi government ministries. Some had links to the crown prince himself. After a series of shifting explanations, Saudi Arabia now denies that this brazen hit job was premeditated. But this reconstruction of the killing, and the botched cover-up, calls their story into serious question. It’s Friday morning, Sept. 28. Khashoggi and his fiancée, Hatice Cengiz, are at the local marriage office in Istanbul. In order to marry, he’s told that he needs Saudi paperwork and goes straight to the consulate to arrange it. They tell him to return in a week. It all seems routine, but it’s not. Inside there’s a Saudi spy, Ahmed al-Muzaini, who’s working under diplomatic cover. That very day, he flies off to Riyadh and helps concoct a plan to intercept Khashoggi when he returns to the consulate. Fast-forward to Monday night into Tuesday morning. Saudi agents converge in Istanbul aboard separate flights. Muzaini, the spy, flies back from Riyadh. A commercial flight carries a three-man team that we believe flew from Cairo. Two of the men are security officers and they’ve previously traveled with the crown prince. A private jet flying from Riyadh lands around 3:30 a.m. That plane is often used by the Saudi government, and it’s carrying nine Saudi officials, some who played key roles in Khashoggi’s death. We’ll get to Team 3 later on, and for now focus on these men from Team 2. This is Salah al-Tubaigy, a high-ranking forensics and autopsy expert in the Saudi interior ministry. Turkish officials will later say his role was to dismember Khashoggi’s body. Another is Mustafa al-Madani, a 57-year-old engineer. As we’ll see, it’s no accident that he looks like Khashoggi. And this is Maher Mutreb, the leader of the operation. Our investigation into his past reveals a direct link between Mutreb and the Saudi crown prince. When bin Salman toured a Houston neighborhood earlier this year, we discovered that Mutreb was with him, a glowering figure in the background. We found him again in Boston, at a U.N. meeting in New York, in Madrid and Paris, too. This global tour was all part of a charm offensive by the prince to paint himself as a moderate reformer. Back then, Mutreb was in the royal guard. Now, he would orchestrate Khashoggi’s killing. And his close ties to the crown prince beg the question, just how high up the Saudi chain of command did the plot to kill go? Early Tuesday morning, Khashoggi flies back from a weekend trip to London. He and the Saudis nearly cross paths at the airport. The Saudi teams check into two hotels, which give quick access to the consulate. Khashoggi heads home with his fiancée. He’d just bought an apartment for their new life together. By mid-morning, the Saudis are on the move. Mutreb leaves his hotel three hours before Khashoggi is due at the consulate. The rest of the team isn’t far behind. The building is only a few minutes away on foot, and soon, they’re spotted at this entrance. Mutreb arrives first. Next, we see al-Tubaigy, the autopsy expert. And now al-Madani, the lookalike. The stage is almost set. A diplomatic car pulls out of the consulate driveway and switches places with a van, which backs in. Turkish officials say this van would eventually carry away Khashoggi’s remains. From above, we can see the driveway is covered, hiding any activity around the van from public view. Meanwhile, Khashoggi and his fiancée set out for the consulate, walking hand-in-hand. In their final hour together, they chat about dinner plans and new furniture for their home. At 1:13 p.m., they arrive at the consulate. Khashoggi gives her his cellphones before he enters. He walks into the consulate. It’s the last time we see him. Inside, Khashoggi is brought to the consul general’s office on the second floor. The hit team is waiting in a nearby room. Sources briefed on the evidence, told us Khashoggi quickly comes under attack. He’s dragged to another room and is killed within minutes. Then al-Tubaigy, the autopsy expert, dismembers his body while listening to music. Maher Mutreb makes a phone call to a superior. He says, “Tell your boss,” and “The deed was done.” Outside, the van reportedly carrying Khashoggi’s body pulls out of the side entrance and drives away. At the same time, the Saudis begin trying to cover their tracks. While Khashoggi’s fiancée waits here where she left him, two figures leave from the opposite side. One of them is wearing his clothes. Later, the Saudis would claim that this was Khashoggi. But it’s al-Madani, the engineer, now a body double pretending that the missing journalist left the consulate alive. Yet there’s one glaring flaw: The clothes are the same, but he’s wearing his own sneakers, the ones he walked in with. Meanwhile, the van that’s allegedly carrying Khashoggi’s body makes the two-minute drive from the consulate to the Saudi consul’s residence. There’s several minutes of deliberations but the van eventually pulls into the building’s driveway. Again, it’s hidden from public view. It’s now three hours since Khashoggi was last seen. The body double hails this taxi and continues weaving a false trail through the city. He heads to a popular tourist area and then changes back into his own clothes. Later, we see him joking around in surveillance footage. Over at the airport, more Saudi officials arrive on another flight from Riyadh. They spend just five hours in Istanbul, but we’re not sure where they go. Now we pick up Maher Mutreb again, exiting from the consul’s house. It’s time for them to go. Mutreb and others check out of their hotel and move through airport security. Al-Muzaini, the spy, heads to the airport too. But as they’re leaving Istanbul, Khashoggi’s fiancée is still outside the consulate, pacing in circles. She’ll soon raise the alarm that Khashoggi is missing and she’ll wait for him until midnight. The alarm spreads around the world. Nine days later, the Saudis send another team to Istanbul. They say it’s to investigate what happened. But among them are a toxicologist and a chemist, who also has ties to the hit team. He and Tubaigy attended a forensics graduation days before Khashoggi was killed. Turkish officials later say that this team’s mission was not to investigate, but to cover up the killing. Now the Saudi story has changed, and prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for several suspects in Khashoggi’s killing. But that doesn’t include Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who many Western government officials are convinced authorized the killing. Khashoggi’s remains still haven’t been found.

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An autopsy expert. A lookalike. A black van. Our video investigation follows the movements of the 15-man Saudi hit team that killed and dismembered the journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

The lawsuit claims that in the months before the killing, the royal court had access to Mr. Khashoggi’s communications about opposition projects with Mr. Abdulaziz because of the spyware on Mr. Abdulaziz’s phone.

Mr. Abdulaziz has said he was also targeted by some of the operatives close to Prince Mohammed who have been linked to the Khashoggi killing as part of a campaign to bring home or silence Saudi dissidents abroad. After pestering him for months with messages urging him to return to the kingdom, two Saudi emissaries met him in Montreal last May to pressure him in person.

Mr. Abdulaziz covertly recorded the conversations. “There are two scenarios,” one of the agents told him, referring to him in the third person as Omar. In the first option, “Omar is a beneficiary or a winner, because he is going back home,” an emissary told him. “The second side, the state, is a winner and is happy as well,” the emissary added, suggesting that the kingdom might pay also Mr. Abdulaziz large sums of money.

If he declined, however, “Omar is a loser because he is going to jail,” the emissary said, and he said Mr. Abdulaziz might be apprehended at an airport. The Saudi emissaries said falsely that Mr. Khashoggi was also considering returning to the kingdom.

The emissaries said they had been sent by Saud al-Qahtani, a close adviser to the crown prince who has been the target of United States sanctions for his alleged role in the Khashoggi killing. A statement announcing the sanctions also identified him as the supervisor of the intelligence agent who led that operation. But the emissaries made clear that their orders had ultimately come from the crown prince.

They promised Mr. Abdulaziz that the day after he landed in Saudi Arabia he would meet with Prince Mohammed and could ask him for anything. They said they had already booked a hotel room for Mr. Abdulaziz in Jeddah.

Mr. Abdulaziz declined to return to the kingdom and also refused a request to visit the Saudi embassy in Ottawa for further discussions. That request began to look more ominous after Mr. Khashoggi’s death in the Istanbul consulate, Mr. Abdulaziz has said.

The next month, in June, he received a text message that looked like a link to track the shipment of a package but turned out to mask a link to the NSO Group’s spyware, according to court papers filed with the lawsuit.

In August, a research group at the University of Toronto that studies online surveillance notified Mr. Abdulaziz that his phone might have been hacked. The research group, Citizen Lab, later concluded that the Saudi government was behind it.

Around the same time as the arrival of the fake text message, Saudi security forces carried out a raid with search dogs in the middle of the night at the home of Mr. Abdulaziz’s family in Jeddah. Two of his brothers were arrested and remain in prison without charges, according to the court papers.

Mr. Abdulaziz “has also learned that the security personnel in the detention center are using torture against them and are subjecting them to inhumane and humiliating treatment, all in order to put pressure on the plaintiff to force him to stop his activism,” the court papers state.

It was also during the period after the spying began that Mr. Abdulaziz and Mr. Khashoggi stepped up their plans for various social media campaigns to counter Saudi government propaganda. Mr. Khashoggi sent Mr. Abdulaziz $5,000 to subsidize that effort.

The lawsuit was filed by an Israeli lawyer, Alaa Mahajna, in cooperation with Mazen Masri, a lecturer at the City University of London.

The lawyers say in the court papers that they intend to argue that the resulting exposure of the collaboration between Mr. Abdulaziz and Mr. Khashoggi “contributed in a significant manner to the decision to murder Mr. Khashoggi.”

A correction was made on 
Dec. 3, 2018

An earlier version of this article overstated what is known about a report by McKinsey & Company about Omar Abdulaziz. Although the report identified him as an influential driver of dissent on social media, it is not clear whether that evaluation was shown to the royal court.

How we handle corrections

Barbara Marcolini contributed reporting from New York.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 9 of the New York edition with the headline: Khashoggi Ally Sues Saudis For Hacking His Cellphone. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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