A classified documented reveals UAE involvement in Europe’s terrorism

A classified documented obtained by the Emirates Leaks revealed a connection between the UAE regime and financing terrorism in Europe.

The document included the testimony of a former employee of the Raven Project in Abu Dhabi, in which she stated that the UAE has a direct relationship with some of the most extreme terrorist acts committed in Europe.

The UAE had financing programs to help impoverished areas that encourage extremism and militancy, and then using technology to collect intelligence and inform its European allies about suspects for allegedly “cooperating in counterterrorism efforts.”

And in January 2019, Reuters reported that the Raven Project was set up to develop technology used to spy on other governments and human rights activists who criticize the Emirati regime.

The list included former US intelligence employees who used their skills to penetrate the computers and phones of opponents of the ruling family in the Emirates.

A former Raven project employee agreed to share her experience on the condition of staying anonymous.

In 2015, an Emirati company called Dark Matter took over the work for Raven. The employee joined them, and here is where the program became a source of greater suspicion.

The employee discovered evidence of payments from the UAE to Marwan Mohamed, the former president of Islamic Aid in France, a collective organization against Islamophobia, which is indirectly linked to the promotion of extremism and has since been dissolved.

The Emirati intelligence was monitoring the social media accounts of Islamic Aid branches and informing its allies of their details.

It is believed that based on this information, France has pushed to launch a nationwide campaign against Islamic relief organizations after the beheading of French middle school teacher Samuel Patty.

The former employee said that the UAE is playing a dangerous game from two sides, one to support terrorism and the other to cooperate in combating terrorism to win its allies trust.

In recent years, the UAE has made great strides in establishing and managing one of the largest networks of piracy and cyber espionage in the world, with Israeli and American expertise.

The Raven spy project began in 2009 with the help of American contractors who worked for the CIA, and White House officials who were under the administration of George W. Bush.

The UAE transferred Raven’s project to a cybersecurity company in Abu Dhabi, Dark Matter, where a number of Americans with the project were forced to finish their mission after they were asked to monitor American citizens using the Karma spyware.

Karma relies in part on a flaw in Apple’s iMessage program, which allowed malware to be implanted even if the phone’s owner did not use iMessage.

Two weeks after leaving her position at the US National Security Agency, in 2014, Lori Stroud began her new job in the Arab region, along with many American experts and intelligence agents. This act, as a Reuters report explains, was in favour of illegal actions by the Emirati authorities.

Stroud joined Project Raven, which consists of a secret team of more than 12 former CIA agents who have been hired to help Abu Dhabi participate in espionage and monitor governments and other countries, including Qatar, as well as human rights activists opposed to the ruling family.

And its work developed, as the agency explains, for three years, until it and other citizens who participated in this project discovered that their work crosses the red line, that is, targeting and monitoring American citizens.

According to the agency, the story of this project reveals how former US government agents used the latest electronic espionage tools to serve an authoritarian regime that targets its opponents.

And at the end of January 2019, the Reuters international news agency was alone with a report entitled: The UAE used a super-electronic weapon to spy on the iPhones of its opponents.

It quoted five former officers and software documents reviewed by Reuters that the spy tool allowed the UAE to monitor hundreds of targets starting in 2016, including the Emir of Qatar, a high-ranking Turkish official and the Nobel Prize-winning Yemeni activist, Tawakkol Karman.

Weeks later, the agency returned to write another exclusive report titled “An Emirati spy program that targeted Al-Jazeera network chief and journalist Giselle Khoury, a presenter on BBC Arabic TV, president of Al-Jazeera network, and other prominent Arab media figures.

According to the leaked letters, the Emiratis also requested that the calls of Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri be intercepted, and the Emirati dissident Ahmed Mansour, one of the most prominent human rights defenders, who was subsequently arrested.

In both cases, UAE agents used a sophisticated spy tool called Karma, in a campaign that showed how super-effective electronic weapons began to infiltrate outside the major powers and reach the hands of smaller countries, according to Reuters.