‘AN ABUSE OF POWER’
Dubai ruler Sheikh Mohammad bin Rashid Al Maktoum hacked the phone of his ex-wife, Jordan’s Princess Haya, and those of her legal team after she fled to London amid a divorce and custody dispute, a U.K. high court judge has found.
Judge Andrew McFarlane said that the findings “represent a total abuse of trust, and indeed an abuse of power, to a significant extent.”
The phone numbers for Princess Haya — half-sister of Jordan’s King Abdullah — and members of her legal and security teams, were among those found on a list of 50,000 numbers targeted by Pegasus spyware.
The military-grade spyware, licensed by the Israeli firm NSO Group, were used in attempts to hack into smartphones belonging to thousands of world leaders, activists and journalists, according to an investigation released in July by The Washington Post and 16 media partners.
