According to forensic data, India attempted to hack the phones of Kashmiri leaders.

SRINAGAR: Between 2017 and mid-2019, an Indian government agency thought to be a customer of Israeli firm NSO Group allegedly attempted to hack the phones of around 25 Hurriyat leaders from Indian-controlled Kashmir.

According to The Wire’s stolen records, more than 25 persons from the occupied Kashmir Valley were chosen as prospective targets of invasive monitoring, in addition to Delhi-based Kashmiri journalists.

Forbidden Stories, a non-profit journalistic organisation headquartered in France, and Amnesty International obtained a large list of 50,000 numbers thought to have been identified as possible monitoring targets by ten nations.

The records were subsequently given with a group of 16 news organisations from across the world, including The Wire, who collaborated over many months to explore the breadth of this planned or real monitoring in a project known as the Pegasus Project.

Two of them, Hurriyat leader Bilal Lone and the late Syed Ali Shah Geelani, were able to have their phones forensically examined by The Wire.

The Israeli company, on the other hand, has disputed that the documents obtained by the Pegasus Project are related to surveillance.

In a letter to the Pegasus Project on Tuesday, NSO stated, “It is not a list of targets or prospective targets of NSO’s clients, and your continuous reliance on this list and identification of the persons on this list as potential surveillance targets is inaccurate and deceptive.”

Before India’s government revoked Jammu and Kashmir’s special constitutional status in August 2019 and imprisoned hundreds of political opponents, dissidents, and activists, Lone founded his own political party, the Peoples Independent Movement, to “avoid confusion” with his brother Sajad Lone’s Peoples Conference.

“There were rumours of phone tapping when I was a kid. I never considered the possibility that I, too, could be a target. But I’m too tiny to do anything about it,” Lone said.

According to the publication’s investigation, forensic examination revealed that Geelani’s phone exhibited obvious evidence of Pegasus spyware activity between February 2018 and January 2019. His presence in the released data corresponds to the days and months when the virus was identified on his phone.