FRANCE 24 spoke to Saudi dissident Yahia Assiri, who founded the NGO ALQST for Human Rights in the United Kingdom, where he lives in exile. The activist claimed that the human rights situation in Saudi Arabia is “the worst ever.” Assiri, who himself has had his devices hacked by spyware, said he is determined to “show the world the behaviour of the Saudi regime.”
Back in May, Assiri filed a lawsuit in the UK against Saudi Arabia over what he describes as cyber attacks against himself using the Israeli-made Pegasus and Quadream spywares. In mid-October, the High Court in London ruled that he did have the right to serve the legal claim to Saudi Arabia.
In the lawsuit, Assiri claims that Jamal Khashoggi – a Saudi journalist who was brutally murdered by Saudi agents in Istanbul in October 2018 – had also been hacked.
“Even if I don’t have forensic evidence about that, I strongly believe that Jamal has been hacked because he was closely monitored. Several people around him, including his fiancée, have been hacked,” Assiri told FRANCE 24.
Since Khashoggi’s murder, the Saudi authorities are “trying to keep the relation with the West as normal, as [it was] before the killing of Jamal Khashoggi,” the exiled dissident noted.
However, the situation for freedom of expression in Saudi Arabia “is the worst ever in our history,” Assiri said.
“Nobody in the country – nobody at all – is allowed to say anything except if there is permission from the authorities. They are monitoring people very harshly, very closely for every single tweet, for every single word and they [have] sentenced people to years and years behind bars for just single tweets.”
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