France prosecutors said on Tuesday that they had launched a probe into allegations of several journalists in France being snooped by Moroccan intelligence services using the Israeli spyware Pegasus.
According to news agency AFP, French prosecutors would examine if there was a breach of personal privacy, fraudulent access to personal electronic devices, and criminal association.
This was after French investigative media platform, Mediapart, claimed that the phones of its founder, Edwy Plenel, and one of its journalists were targeted by Moroccan intelligence services.
A collaborative investigation by several media outlets around the globe including London’s The Guardian, the US-based The Washington Post, France’s Le Monde revealed how several governments around the world had used the Iasraeli malware to spy on journalists, activists and other officials.
In India, those being spied on included dozens of journalists, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi and his close aides, former Election Commissioner Ashok Lavasa, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s cabinet colleagues Ashwini Vaishnaw and Prahlad Patel among others.
The investigation by media outlets also claimed how the woman, who had accused the then Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi of sexual harassment, was put on the list of surveillance along with her family members using Israeli spyware. Gogoi was later nominated to the Rajya Sabha by the Narendra Modi government. Demands are now growing for his ouster from the parliament so that he could be put on trial in the court of law.
The Congress has raised the issue, demanding the sacking of Home Minister Amit Shah. The party said in a statement, “The unpardonable sin is that the snooping and hacking of cell phones through ‘Pegasus’ has given illegal access to the entire conversations, passwords, contact lists, text messages and live voice calls of India’s security apparatus, Union Ministers, Opposition Leaders, Paramilitary Chiefs, Supreme Court Judges and others. This is clearly “TREASON” and total abdication of “National Security” by the Modi Government, more so when the foreign company could possibly have access to this data.
And the person responsible for it is none less than the Home Minister of India, Shri Amit Shah. Of course, it could not be done without the consent and concurrence of the Prime Minister, Shri Narendra Modi. This is an unforgivable sacrilege and negation of Constitutional oath by the Home Minister and the Prime Minister.”
The parliament’s Monsoon Session has been disrupted by the uproar from the opposition parties over the issue. Many allege that the BJP may have committed electoral fraud by snooping Rahul Gandhi and a former election commissioner in the run-up to the last general elections in 2019.
Ashok Lavasa was the only election commissioner in the three-member national poll body to have refused to give Modi a clean chit on the violations of election codes.