Jamal Khashoggi: The suspect of a Saudi murder had a spying training

The BBC revealed new details about one of the men accused of murdering Jamal Khashoggi, a reputed Saudi journalist who criticized the government of his country.

The Turkish media have identified Maher Abdulaziz Mutreb as part of a team of 15 alleged members of Saudi agents who traveled to Istanbul on the day of Mr. Khashoggi's disappearance from the Saudi consulate of the city on 2 October.

He reportedly spent two years in London with a source describing him as a colonel of Saudi intelligence services to the CNN news network.

And now, BBC Arabic may reveal that he had learned to use offensive spyware technology on behalf of the Saudi state.

The source, who spoke with the BBC on condition of anonymity, visually confirmed his identity through media images in the days following Khashoggi's disappearance.

According to him, Mutreb was reported as "an intelligence security officer". The spyware trainers, however, have dubbed it "dark face".

"Because he always looked grumpy, as he was on the sad side … he was very quiet," the source added.

Saudi Arabia denies having knowledge of what happened to Mr. Khashoggi, insisting that he left the consulate shortly after receiving the basic documents.

Trained to target citizens

The European surveillance expert explained how Mr. Mutreb had followed a two-week training in 2011, explaining to him how to use the technology that his company offered to the Saudi government so that he could conduct targeted attacks on phones and computers of its own citizens.

"The training involved things like infecting a computer from potential targets of interest to intelligence and extracting information, so digital evidence, information about that person of interest.

"This information could have been essentially everything [their] GPS position, talk, microphone sound around the camera itself, camera images, disc files, emails, contacts, everything on the camera itself -even. "

During the training, which was being held in a military complex in the suburbs of Riyadh, the surveillance expert stated that Mr. Mutreb "used to come and go" and "n & rsquo; Almost did not speak at all ".

"He was not one to be particularly good at the technical level," said the spyware trainer.

"The group was divided between those who had physical intelligence … so the cameras, microphones, etc., and another group of people who were watching digitally … I think this guy was more in physical surveillance than in digital surveillance. "

The tools in which he was trained, the source said, were similar to other tools that, according to Citizenlab and Amnesty International, have recently been used against several friends of Mr. Khashoggi.

Paper trail

Mr Mutreb reportedly spent two years at the Saudi Embbady in London. A document published by the British government in 2007 mentioned a man with that name as first secretary.

However, he was also appointed Saudi intelligence officer by several people and some disclosed documents.

CNN spoke to a Saudi source in London who said he knew Mr. Mutreb, describing him as a colonel of Saudi intelligence services, while the famous Arabic application MenoM3ay – which allows users to see the badociated names to phone numbers – lists a man with this name appoint colonel to the royal court.

On October 12, Wikileaks tweeted the Khashoggi files, containing emails named Mutreb and five other men supposed to have taken a course in Italy in 2011, led by an Italian company called Hacking Team.

The emails were part of a 400GB dump of data first published by Wikileaks in July 2015, which would have been stolen by the hacking team from their internal network.

The e-mails also included conversations suggesting that the intelligence agencies with which Hacking Team had been working were using it to spy on activists and journalists.

The emails included a list of countries to which they sold their tools, including Egypt, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Sudan. Hacking Team also sells surveillance software, some of which have offensive capabilities.