World 2022: personalities critical of Qatar spied on

These personalities have been targeted for their investigations or their critical positions on the awarding and organization of the FIFA World Cup by Qatar, which will begin on November 20, amid calls for a boycott of the competition.

The country is particularly implicated for the treatment of workers on construction sites linked to competition or respect for the rights of women and LGBT people.

Among the targets of these hackers are journalists, such as that of the Sunday Times Jonathan Calvert, who had investigated the corrupt maneuvers that led to the awarding of the test to Qatar in 2010, a French senator, Nathalie Goulet, who had accused Qatar of financing “Islamic terrorism”, or the American-Hungarian lawyer Mark Somos who had filed a complaint against the royal family of Qatar before the United Nations High Council for Human Rights.

The former president of UEFA, Michel Platini, a great defender of Qatar’s candidacy to organize the World Cup, was also spied on.

This would have happened shortly before he was heard by French justice as part of an investigation into suspicions of corruption in the awarding of the World Cup to this Gulf country.

According to data retrieved by the Sunday Times and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism this year, it was from 2019 that these operations of hacking mailboxes or taking remote control of microphones and cameras from computers began. about fifty personalities, created by a group of Indian hackers.

“The investigation clearly indicates that the client (of the hackers) is the host of the next World Cup: Qatar”, write the journalists.

The use of the Indian group of hackers would have been made through former British police or intelligence officers, now working in the private sector, details the Sunday Times investigation.

Qatari government lawyers, interviewed by the newspaper, denied Qatar’s involvement in this vast hacking operation.

Beyond Qatar, the Sunday Times investigation reveals many other cases of hacking of personalities carried out by the same Indian group, on behalf of English law firms, autocratic regimes.

Swiss President Ignazio Cassis was thus targeted just after an interview devoted to sanctions against Russia with Boris Johnson when he was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, just like Philip Hammond when he was British Finance Minister and while he was doing dealing with the fallout from the Russian novichok poisonings in the UK.

An oligarch who fled Russia was also reportedly targeted at the request of a London law firm working for the Russian state.