A late night phone call from Cherie Blair helped blow the lid off the sheikh’s hack attack in Britain – and the victims included a Tory peer.
Shortly after 10pm on August 5 last year, she found a number for Baroness Shackleton and informed her fellow lawyer she had ‘some important information’.
Minutes earlier, Mrs Blair had taken a call from a senior figure at a secretive Israeli tech firm, NSO Group, which makes controversial military-grade spyware known as Pegasus.
New court papers have shown that Princess Haya Bint al-Hussein of Jordan, pictured right, and her lawyer Baroness Fiona Shackleton, left, had their phones hacked
Princess Haya is married to Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, right,
Cherie Blair QC, pictured, received a tip off from her client, Israeli security firm NSO Group that their military-grade software was being used to hack phones belonging to Baroness Shackleton and Princess Haya
The QC wife of Tony Blair has been working for NSO Group as a legal adviser, it emerged in court. In the call from NSO headquarters, she was instructed to tip off British solicitor Baroness Shackleton and her client Princess Haya bint al-Hussein that its spyware may have been ‘misused’ to monitor their mobile phones.
Mrs Blair later told the High Court in a written statement: ‘The NSO senior manager told me that NSO were very concerned about this and asked me to contact Baroness Shackleton urgently so she could notify Princess Haya.’
It was thanks to Mrs Blair’s whistleblowing – along with a Californian cyber detective named Dr William Marczak and a mysterious Gulf state dissident known as ‘Mr X’ whose own phone was targeted by Dubai’s secret service – that Sheikh Mohammed’s dubious UK spying scheme was exposed.
The High Court has now concluded on the balance of probabilities that he orchestrated the illegal hacking of six phones, belonging to Princess Haya, two of her lawyers, her PA and two bodyguards.
Pegasus has the ability to siphon off photos, messages, emails, contacts, passwords and other data from an iPhone – and even to turn it into a clandestine eavesdropping device. NSO Group only sells the powerful spyware to governments, including the United Arab Emirates (UAE) of which Dubai is a part.
The judge said Sheikh Mohammed, the ruler of Dubai, and prime minister of the UAE, ‘is prepared and able to use the government security services for his own family needs’. His hacking operation took place last July and August, with Pegasus – apparently being remotely operated by Dubai spymasters – stealing some 265 megabytes
