A new report revealed that the phones of at least three Bahraini activists were hacked using the "Pegasus" spyware program from the Israeli company NSO.

The report, prepared by the Canadian cybersecurity lab "Citizen Lab" in partnership with the Gulf Group for Monitoring Freedom and Press "Red Line", stated that investigations concluded that the phones of three individuals in Bahrain were hacked in 2021 using Pegasus.

The lab mentioned the names of two while withholding the name of the third person at their request.

Among the targeted is Mohammed Al-Tajer, a prominent Bahraini lawyer, whose phone was hacked by the FinFisher spyware and he was blackmailed in a case linked to the Bahraini government in 2011, according to the report.

Al-Tajer's phone was also hacked on September 2, 2021, about a week after a previous report by the groups Red Line for Gulf and Citizen Lab about the hacking of Bahraini activists' devices.

The report said that an analysis of Al-Tajer's phone, an iPhone 11 Pro Max, showed that the device was hacked by Pegasus spyware at least three times in September 2021, starting from September 2, 2021, and ending on September 27, 2021.

The second phone belongs to Dr. Sharifa Suwar, a Bahraini exiled psychiatrist accused a member of the Bahraini royal family of involvement in a scheme to distribute drugs for recreational use to school children.

Mohammed Al-Tajer and Sharifa Suwar are the most prominent among the activists whose phones were hacked in Bahrain.

Dr. Suwar's iPhone was also hacked by Pegasus on June 10, 2021, while she was still in Bahrain.

According to the same report, the second hack occurred about a month after a royal pardon for her.

The report said that the third person referred to by the letter "A", apparently a journalist, had his phone hacked in September 2021, where he received a notification from Apple in November 2021 that his device was targeted by government hackers.

The journalist "A", who preferred to remain anonymous, was active in broadcasting news about protests and current events in Bahrain.

The report says about him: "Our analysis of the journalist's 'iPhone 6S' shows that it was hacked using Pegasus spyware on September 20, 2021."

Furthermore, a previous report by the Gulf Group for Monitoring Freedom and Press "Red Line" said that the discovery of hacking of some activists' phones came after a general examination of their phones in 2021, "where several hacking cases by the Bahraini government appeared."

The report stated: "We attribute all three cases with high confidence to the Pegasus spyware from the NSO Group, because all hacks contain indicators we have linked to it."

Citizen Lab first discovered traces of Pegasus in Bahrain in 2017, several years before the normalization of relations between Bahrain and Israel.