Bezos’s cell phone was hacked in 2018, after he received a WhatsApp message that apparently had been sent from Mohamed Bin Salmán’s account, as previously reported.
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UN experts have announced that they have information that points to the “possible participation” of the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohamed bin Salmán, in the ‘hacking’ of the phone of the founder and executive director of the American company Amazon, Jeff Bezos, in 2018, AP review.
In a joint statement, Agnes Callamard and David Kaye, United Nations special rapporteurs for extrajudicial killings and freedom of expression, respectively, demanded “an immediate investigation by the United States and other relevant authorities.”
On Tuesday, the British newspaper The Guardian reported, citing sources familiar with the matter, that Bezos’s cell phone was hacked in 2018, after he received an encrypted message from WhatsApp on May 1 of that year with a malicious video file that apparently had been sent from Bin Salmán’s personal account.
For its part, the Embassy of Saudi Arabia in the US tildó the news of the British means of “absurd”. “We request an investigation into these statements so that we can have all the facts,” says the message published by that agency on its official Twitter page.
Bezos and the Khashoggi case
While Riyadh was supposedly investigating the assassination of the Saudi royal family critic and columnist for The Washington Post, Jamal Khashoggi, and prosecuting those he held responsible, he was also “secretly undertaking a massive online campaign against Bezos and Amazon, which primarily attacked him as the owner of The Washington Post, “experts said in his statement.
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The UN special rapporteurs reviewed a 2019 digital forensic analysis of the Bezos iPhone. They noted that the records showed that within a few hours of receiving a video of the WhatsApp account of the crown prince, there were “an abnormal and extreme change in phone behavior“with huge amounts of phone data transmitted during the following months.
Last March, an investigation pointed to Saudi Arabia as responsible for ‘hacking’ the mobile phone of the owner of Amazon to access his private information in an alleged revenge for the coverage that The Washington Post, which belongs to Bezos, made murder of his Saudi columnist Jamal Khashoggi.
In January 2019, the American tabloid The National Enquirer leaked intimate photos in which Bezos appears with Lauren Sánchez Whitesell, a married woman, which would have led to divorce from his wife MacKen.
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