Moroccan journalists recount years of surveillance amid new Amnesty claim Amnesty cites a whistleblower’s account of how Morocco allegedly uses surveillance to silence journalists. Rabat, Morocco – “I was surveilled not because of a specific article. I was investigating land dispossession in Morocco. I then learned I was a Pegasus target,” Omar Radi, a journalist and human rights defender, told Al Jazeera, referring to the mobile surveillance tool developed by Israeli company NSO Group. The find
10/05/26 • 30 Lượt xem
Amnesty cites a whistleblower’s account of how Morocco allegedly uses surveillance to silence journalists.
Rabat, Morocco – “I was surveilled not because of a specific article. I was investigating land dispossession in Morocco. I then learned I was a Pegasus target,” Omar Radi, a journalist and human rights defender, told Al Jazeera, referring to the mobile surveillance tool developed by Israeli company NSO Group.
The findings emerged in June 2020, when Amnesty International Security Lab examined his phone. Radi, now based in Germany, said he had spent two years, from 2018 to 2020, noticing signs including his phone’s battery draining quickly, its temperature rising and the network slowing down.
The physical surveillance, he said, was barely discreet.
“They came every day to get a daily report from the parking attendants in my street, the shops I used to go to, and my friends,” he said. “I would sometimes turn around and walk towards the people following me to take photographs, but they ran quickly and hid their faces.”
His case is among four detailed in a new Amnesty International report, We Start With the Verdict: Inside Morocco’s Surveillance Machine, produced with 14 media organisations and coordinated by the international network of journalists Forbidden Stories.
The other three are Fouad Abdelmoumni, a veteran activist; Abdessadak El Bouchattaoui, a human rights lawyer; and Hicham Mansouri, a journalist in exile who had been imprisoned in 2015 on charges of adultery and sexual exploitation, which Amnesty describes as trumped-up.
The report draws on interviews with a whistleblower using the pseudonym Safir, a former employee of Morocco’s General Directorate for Territorial Surveillance (DGST). Amnesty said it corroborated key parts of Safir’s testimony with independent sources, technical evidence and interviews with 10 people identified as surveillance targets, including Radi.
“The Amnesty report connected many dots as to what I was living and feeling while I was under tight surveillance,” Radi said.
“It explains the extraordinary aspect of my police interrogations and my trial, where many of my rights weren’t respected, because even the judicial police and the judges were under monitoring,” he added.
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