InvestigationAccording to lists of numbers potentially targeted by the Pegasus spyware analyzed by Forbidden Stories, Amnesty International and sixteen media outlets, including “Le Monde”, the Kazakh regime is not only interested in its opponents, but is also monitoring its members. more powerful.
For thirty years, the regime in place in Kazakhstan, authoritarian and corrupt, has put its civil society in regulated cuts. And even far from the country, dissidents are followed closely. Moukhtar Abliazov can attest to this: in France for nearly ten years, this former oligarch who has just obtained political refugee status was a potential target, in the second half of 2018, of the Pegasus spyware. Several of his phone numbers are on a list of more than 50,000 numbers selected by NSO Group customers for possible hacking, which Forbidden Stories and Amnesty International viewed and shared with sixteen media outlets, including The world.
It was impossible to carry out a technical analysis of these phones, a necessary step to find out whether the infection was successful, the latter having been seized in October by the French justice, after a 2017 complaint from the Kazakh bank BTA l ‘accusing of embezzling 6.4 billion euros.
Software sold exclusively to states
Everything suggests that the Kazakh authorities are behind this operation. Pegasus software is only sold by its developer, the Israeli company NSO, to states. Mr. Abliazov has been engaged, for more than twenty years, in a diplomatic-judicial standoff with the authorities of his country who accuse him, in particular, of having embezzled very large sums of money when he was boss of the state bank BTA. Allegations that he has always disputed. Mr. Abliazov has been the subject, in recent years, of several extradition attempts, not only from Kazakhstan, but also from Russia and Ukraine.
“For more than twenty years, the regime has wanted to silence me and prevent me from denouncing the kleptocracy which is gnawing at the country. He has already invested hundreds of millions of dollars in lawyers, public relations agencies and specialized hacking teams. I am therefore not surprised to be on the list of people targeted by Kazakhstan ”, Mukhtar Abliazov reacted.
The elements analyzed by The world show that Mr. Abliazov is not the only one to have been targeted by Pegasus in the second half of 2018. In France, several activists, a journalist and a lawyer specializing in human rights, who gravitated several years earlier around Mukhtar Abliazov, his entourage and his supporters were targeted for possible hacking. One of them, Quentin Guillemain, founder of the NGO Cosmopolitan Project Foundation, in 2014, announced his intention to file a complaint.
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