Rabat, Morocco – “I was surveilled not because of a specific article. I was investigating land dispossession in Morocco. I then learned I was a Pegasus target,” Omar Radi, a journalist and human rights defender, told Al Jazeera, referring to the mobile surveillance tool developed by Israeli company NSO Group.
The findings emerged in June 2020, when Amnesty International Security Lab examined his phone. Radi, now based in Germany, said he had spent two years, from 2018 to 2020, noticing signs including his phone’s battery draining quickly, its temperature rising and the network slowing down. The physical surveillance, he said, was barely discreet.
The other three are Fouad Abdelmoumni, a veteran activist; Abdessadak El Bouchattaoui, a human rights lawyer; and Hicham Mansouri, a journalist in exile who had been imprisoned in 2015 on charges of adultery and sexual exploitation, which Amnesty describes as trumped-up. The report draws on interviews with a whistleblower using the pseudonym Safir, a former employee of Morocco’s General Directorate for Territorial Surveillance (DGST). Amnesty said it corroborated key parts of Safir’s testimony with independent sources, technical evidence and interviews with 10 people identified as surveillance targets, including Radi.
Amnesty identifies the DGST as the agency behind the deployment of Pegasus spyware in Morocco and documents what it describes as abuses of the spyware against activists and journalists between 2017 and 2021. Morocco has previously rejected Amnesty’s allegations that its authorities used Pegasus to target journalists, activists and other critics. In statements issued in 2020 and 2022, Moroccan authorities challenged Amnesty to provide material evidence supporting its claims.
Amnesty said it wrote to Moroccan authorities four weeks before publishing its latest report and invited them to respond, but received no response. Al Jazeera also sought comment from Moroccan officials but had not received a response at the time of publication. Moroccan media have also challenged the latest report.
Le360 cited arguments that the presence of a phone number in Pegasus targeting records does not, by itself, prove that a device was infected or establish who ordered an alleged attack. The outlet also argued that Amnesty had not provided the conclusive technical and material evidence Moroccan authorities had demanded. The report says Morocco’s Pegasus operations were fully active by October 2017, pointing to the case of human rights lawyer El Bouchattaoui, whose number was entered into the system in September 2017 and selected for targeting weeks before he received an infection link by text message.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
