The London High Court awarded a Saudi satirist and human rights activist more than £3 million ($4.1 million USD) in damages on Monday after finding “compelling evidence” that his phone had been hacked with government-grade spyware.
Ghanem Al-Masarir, a London-based comic whose popular YouTube channel featured videos of him criticizing Saudi Arabia, while earning him millions of viewers, sued the Saudi government in 2019 after claiming his phone was targeted a year earlier with Pegasus, a mobile spyware sold by NSO Group exclusively to governments.
Al-Masari was also physically assaulted in London in 2018, around the time his phone was targeted. He accused agents working for the de facto leader of Saudi Arabia, Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, of staging the attack. Real-world attacks are often used in conjunction with digital surveillance tools like Pegasus, researchers have found.
The comic and activist said the attacks on his phone and the physical assault caused deep depression, ending his YouTube career.
Saudi Arabia rebuffed Al-Masarir’s legal challenge, saying it had state immunity from prosecution, a claim it had successfully argued in an earlier case in which the Saudi leader was accused of orchestrating the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in a Saudi consulate in Turkey.
But the High Court rejected Saudi’s claim of immunity in Al-Masarir’s legal case, prompting the Kingdom to take no part in the litigation going forward, according to Reuters, which first reported the court ruling.
“There is a compelling basis for concluding that [al-Masarir’s] iPhones were hacked by Pegasus spyware which resulted in the exfiltration of data from those mobile phones,” wrote Justice Pushpinder Saini in his ruling.
The judge said that the hacking was “directed or authorised” by the Saudi government or its agents. Justice Saini also found that the Saudi government was probably responsible for Al-Masarir’s assault.
It’s not clear if Saudi Arabia will pay Al-Masarir, or if the government plans to appeal.
A spokesperson for NSO Group, which makes and sells access to the Pegasus spyware, did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment. Neither did a spokesperson for the Saudi Embassy in Washington D.C.
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