Thread by @OCCRP

NEW: Emmanuel Macron 🇫🇷, Cyril Ramaphosa 🇿🇦, and Kassym-Jomart Tokayev 🇰🇿 are just some of the world leaders selected for targeting with Pegasus spyware.

Some were selected by foreign powers, others by their own governments.

A #PegasusProject thread👇 1/
occrp.org/en/the-pegasus…

Evidence strongly indicates that 3 sitting presidents were selected for targeting by foreign states:

🇫🇷 French President Macron
🇮🇶 Iraqi President Salih
🇿🇦 South African President Ramaphosa

Read the full story to see which countries likely selected them for surveillance. 2/

But five other world leaders were likely selected by agents from their own countries

🇰🇿 Kazakhstan: President Tokayev, Prime Minister Mamin, former PM Sagintayev
🇲🇦 Morocco: King Mohammed VI & Prime Minister El Othmani. 3/

The phone number of Mexico’s President López Obrador 🇲🇽 was not itself selected — but more than two dozen people close to him, including his wife, children, and a doctor, were. 4/

If successfully implanted, NSO Group’s Pegasus system could have grabbed essentially any data from any of these phones. The software could have also turned on their mics and cameras.

You can learn more how this spyware works here: 5/ occrp.org/en/the-pegasus…

Read our FAQ to learn more about the Pegasus Project and the data it’s based on — including what we know about the leaked list of numbers, why we believe it represents targeting, and in which cases we know for sure. 6/ occrp.org/en/the-pegasus…

The Pegasus Project is a collaborative investigative series led by @FbdnStories with tech support from @amnesty.

OCCRP and partners will publish more stories in the coming days. You can find all of our reporting here. 7/ occrp.org/en/the-pegasus…