New Delhi: A phone belonging to activist Rona Wilson, one of the accused persons in the Bhima Koregaon case, was infected with the Pegasus spyware three months before his arrest in June 2018, a forensic analysis of the device by Amnesty International has revealed, The Guardian reported on Friday.
Wilson is among the 13 activists and academicians still in jail for allegedly conspiring to set off caste violence in a village near Pune in 2018.
The Pegasus spyware, developed by Israeli technology company NSO Group, has been at the centre of a debate on privacy violations and illegal surveillance. The firm has maintained it only sells its products to government law enforcement and intelligence clients to help them monitor security threats.
But in July, a global investigation involving 17 news organisations, including The Guardian, The Washington Post and Indian news website The Wire, had revealed that the software was allegedly used to spy on heads of states, activists and journalists in several countries.
The organisations had accessed a database of numbers, which reflected potential targets of cyber surveillance through Pegasus. Wilson’s phone number was also on the database along with the contacts of activists and dissidents from across the world, The Guardian reported.
Amnesty International was also a partner in the investigation, which is called the Pegasus Project. Scroll. In
