Murdered Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi was involved in a social media-driven youth movement to counter Saudi state propaganda in the months before he died, according to a report.
Khashoggi, who went missing on Oct. 2, discussed his plans with Canadian-based Saudi activist Omar Abdulaziz, 27, in a series of WhatsApp messages before he believes their correspondence may have been intercepted by Saudi authorities in August, CNN reported Sunday. The offensive included sending supporters foreign SIM cards so they could tweet in the kingdom while avoiding detection.
“We have no parliament; we just have Twitter,” Abdulaziz told CNN of their operation, which they called “cyber bees.” “Twitter is the only tool they’re using to fight and to spread their rumors. We’ve been attacked, we’ve been insulted, we’d been threatened so many times, and we decided to do something.”
Abdulaziz added his name last week to a lawsuit filed in Israel and Cyprus against the NSO Group, an Israeli firm whose military-grade spyware was reported to have been used by the Saudi government to hack his phone and access his texts with Khashoggi. The technology is additionally understood to have been deployed against another dissident named Yahya Assiri and an Amnesty International staff member.
“The hacking of my phone played a major role in what happened to Jamal, I am really sorry to say,” Abdelaziz said. “The guilt is killing me.”
Khashoggi, a fierce critic of the Saudi royal family, disappeared in October when he visited the country’s consulate in Istanbul to obtain paperwork to marry his Turkish fiancee. President Trump has been criticized for taking a soft stance against Saudi Arabia, despite the CIA reportedly finding with “high confidence” that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was involved in the death of the U.S. resident and Washington Post columnist. The royal court has vehemently denied having any connection to the international incident.
In some of his messages with Abdulaziz, Khashoggi described Crown Prince Mohammed as a “beast,” saying he “loves force, oppression and needs to show them off.”
Abdulaziz also told CNN on Sunday he was approached in May by two men who said they had been sent by Crown Prince Mohammed himself. Abdulaziz secretly recorded the pair offering him a job and recommending that Abdulaziz visit the Saudi Embassy in Canada to collect documents.
But Abdulaziz said Khashoggi advised against it: “He told me not to go and only to meet them in public places.”
