SAN FRANCISCO/CAIRO - Two UN officials
will report on Wednesday that there is enough evidence
suggesting that Saudi Arabia had hacked Amazon.com Inc founder
Jeff Bezos' phone and both the kingdom and the United States
should investigate, a person familiar with the matter said.
The United Nations' officials plan a public statement
asserting that they found credible a forensic report
commissioned by Bezos' security team which concluded that his
phone probably had been hacked with a tainted video sent from a
WhatsApp account belonging to Saudi's crown prince Mohammed bin
Salman.
The report by FTI Consulting concluded that massive amounts
of data began leaving Bezos’ phone about a month after the video
was shared in mid-2018, the person said, declining to be
identified due to the sensitivity of the subject.
Outside experts consulted by the UN agreed that while the
case was not airtight, the evidence was strong enough to warrant
a fuller investigation.
The report is set to worsen relations between the world's
richest man and the kingdom which had soured following the
murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, who was also
a columnist for the Bezos' owned Washington Post.
The Guardian first reported the crown prince's alleged involvement. It said the encrypted
message from the number used by the crown prince is believed to
have included a malicious file that infiltrated the phone Bezos
had used and extracted large amounts of data.
Saudi Arabia's U.S. embassy dismissed the report.
"Recent media reports that suggest the Kingdom is behind a
hacking of Mr. Jeff Bezos' phone are absurd. We call for an
investigation on these claims so that we can have all the facts
out," it said in a message posted on Twitter.
The UN statement will come from Agnes Callamard, special
rapporteur for extra-judicial killings, and David Kaye, special
rapporteur for free expression.
They are building toward a fuller report they expect to give
to the UN in June, the person said. They said in Twitter posts
that they will be releasing a statement on Wednesday addressing
the Guardian report.
Amazon declined to comment.
The relationship between the Amazon chief executive and the
Saudi government had soured since early last year after he
alluded to Saudi Arabia's displeasure at the Washington Post's
coverage of the murder of Khashoggi.
Bezos' security chief said at the time that Saudi had access
to his phone and gained private information from it involving
text messages between him and a former television anchor, who
the National Enquirer tabloid newspaper said Bezos was dating.
Saudi had said it had nothing to do with the reporting.
Additional reporting by Jeffrey Dastin in San Francisco;
Editing by Miyoung Kim & Kim Coghill