Just as Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man, suspects a WhatsApp message from Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler was used to hack his phone, the murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi also feared that his mobiles might be used against him in the days before he was murdered. On October 2, 2018, when he entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, he made a point of leaving his two mobile phones outside with his fiancée. They are still with Turkish police, who fear that handing them to the Saudis could endanger the journalist’s contacts, many of them dissidents. Audio recordings made by Turkish intelligence reveal that a few minutes before his murder, Khashoggi’s killers told him to text his eldest son to tell him he was safe.

Source: The Times January 26, 2020 02:03 UTC