Azerbaijani authorities used spyware to shadow journalists

Human rights defenders have found out that the software of the Israeli NSO Group Company was used by intelligence services of a number of countries to spy on journalists, lawyers and politicians. The list of those who were shadowed included Azerbaijani journalists Khadija Ismayilova and Sevindj Vagifgyzy.

Human rights defenders and journalists managed to get a list of tapped telephones, which contains 50,000 numbers entered by a dozen of clients of the Israeli company into the Pegasus system. The wiretapping had been conducted since 2016. The list failed to identify phone owners, but journalists managed to identify more than a thousand people from more than 50 countries. Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Morocco, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Togo and the United Arab Emirates are recognized as potential clients of the NSO Group, says the report posted on the website of the human rights organization Amnesty International on July 18.

Among those who were spied by means of the spyware by authorities and law enforcers were Azerbaijani journalists Khadija Ismayilova and Sevindj Vagifgyzy. Both have been shadowed since 2019, according to the report.

This article was originally published on the Russian page of 24/7 Internet agency ‘Caucasian Knot’ on July 19, 2021 at 02:06 am MSK. To access the full text of the article, click here.