Rabat – Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia Mohammed bin Salman was allegedly involved in hacking the mobile phone of Amazon owner Jeff Bezos, the Guardian reported on Wednesday.
Bezos, who is also the owner of the Washington Post, had his phone hacked in 2018 after he received a WhatsApp message from the Saudi crown prince, sources told the British news outlet.
The message from MBS allegedly carried “ malicious files” that enabled the hacking of Bezos’ phone in May 2018.
The hacking occurred six months before the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October 2018.
The malicious file in a video sent from MBS’ account exfiltrated “large amounts” of data from Bezos’ telephone.
The Saudi Embassy in the US denied that the kingdom has any connection to the phone hack.
“Recent media reports that suggest the Kingdom is behind hacking of Mr. Jeff Bezos’ phone are absurd,” the embassy wrote on Twitter.
The embassy also announced that Saudi Arabia will investigate the “claims so that we can have all the facts out.”
Earlier this year Bezos wrote a post blog about the leak of private texts by the National Enquirer.
“I engaged investigators to learn how those texts were obtained, and to determine the motives for the many unusual actions taken by the Enquirer,” he wrote.
Bezos also accused the National Enquirer of blackmail and threats to leak his photos online.
The world’s richest man concluded that his ownership of the Washington Post is a “complexifier” for him.
“It’s unavoidable that certain powerful people who experience Washington Post news coverage will wrongly conclude I am their enemy,” said the renowned businessman.
He accused Donald Trump of being one of those people.
“Obvious by his many tweets. Also, the Post’s essential and unrelenting coverage of the murder of its columnist Jamal Khashoggi is undoubtedly unpopular in certain circles,” he said.
Bezos hired a group of experts to identify who is behind the leak of information about his private life.
The Guardian says that the recent exclusive information about the hacking of Bezos’ phone might raise questions about the circumstances about how the Enquirer “came to publish intimate details” about the businessman’s private life.
The murder of Khashoggi came five months after the hacking of Bezos’ phone.
