Killed Saudi journalist Khashoggi's wife alleges Pegasus spying her
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Hanan Elatr, wife of the murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, is getting to sue the Israeli spyware maker NSO Group for targeting her with Pegasus software.
The 52-year-old will also haul to the US court, where she is suing them both, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) for targeting her with the software.
Hanan Elatr, who has applied for political asylum in the US, alleged attempts to install the software on her mobile phone.
The Pegasus software can turn a phone into a surveillance gadget using its microphone and cameras activated without the user knowing.
Meanwhile Elatr's attempts through her legal counsel Randa Fahmy to retrieve from Turkish embassy in Washington two mobile phones, an iPad and a laptop belonging to her husband failed last year, according to the report.
In her efforts to gather evidence, she is getting help from former UN official Agnès Callamard who probed the murder being a rapporteur for extrajudicial killings.
Khashoggi, a columnist for the Washington Post, was reportedly killed and dismembered at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October 2018.
Following which fingers were pointed at Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman with US intelligence agencies alleging that murder took place at his approval.
Salman denied wrongdoing while describing that the " heinous crime' and also ' mistake committed by officials working for the Saudi government".
Subsequently, Saudi authorities picked 11 men accusing them of the crime and sentenced them to death which was later overturned.
A joint investigation by Guardian and its partners revealed that NSO had targeted Elatr between November 2017 and April 2018 , several months before Khashoggi was killed.
A forensic examination of Elatr's Android phone in 2021 found that she had been sent four text messages containing malicious links connected to Pegasus, although successful installation was not proven by the analysis, The Guardian reported.
However, a spokesman for NSO reportedly rejected Elatr's charges saying its technology was not associated with the murder of Jamal Khashoggi or any of his family members, including Hanan Elatr.