Khashoggi widow files complaint in France alleging Saudi government infected devices with spyware

The widow of slain Saudi journalist and dissident Jamal Khashoggi has filed a legal complaint in a French court alleging that Saudi Arabia deployed spyware to snoop on her devices before her spouse was murdered.

Hanan Elatr Khashoggi, a former flight attendant, says in the complaint filed Monday that she flew through France routinely at the time her phone data was being stolen, according to a copy of the complaint seen by Agence France-Presse.

The French complaint does not specifically name one party, the news outlet reported. A French judge will determine if the complaint should be probed.

Khashoggi, who wrote negative stories about Saudi Arabia in the Washington Post, was killed in the country’s Istanbul consulate in 2018.

A 2021 U.S. intelligence report concluded that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered henchmen to murder Khashoggi. Bin Salman denies any wrongdoing in the case. Last month President Donald Trump defended the crown prince during an Oval Office visit.

The digital forensic research institute Citizen Lab found that Elatr Khashoggi’s two phones had been infected with the NSO Group’s powerful Pegasus spyware, the complaint reportedly says.

Elatr Khashoggi has said the infection occurred while she was being questioned in the United Arab Emirates, which is strongly allied with Saudi Arabia.

"It would be unthinkable not to establish a link between this interception (of information) and the actions that led to the murder" of her husband, attorneys William Bourdon and Vincent Brengarth told AFP in a statement.

In October 2023, a U.S. federal judge tossed a lawsuit Elatr Khashoggi filed against the NSO Group in Virginia, saying she failed to establish that her allegations against the spyware firm were linked to that jurisdiction.

NSO Group has been a frequent target of litigation for the role it has played in facilitating spyware targeting and infections.

In October, a Northern California federal judge ordered NSO Group to stop using WhatsApp infrastructure to mount its attacks. The company has said that the order could put it out of business.

That court order followed a 2019 lawsuit WhatsApp filed against NSO, alleging that it had targeted 1,400 of the Meta-owned messaging platform’s users with Pegasus.