A new Amnesty International report, produced with 14 media organisations and coordinated by Forbidden Stories, identifies Morocco's General Directorate for Territorial Surveillance (DGST) as the operator behind Pegasus spyware deployments against activists and journalists between 2017 and 2021. The report draws heavily on testimony from a whistleblower using the pseudonym Safir, described as a former DGST employee, whose account Amnesty says it corroborated with independent sources, technical evidence, and interviews with 10 identified surveillance targets. The scale is specific. Amnesty's analysis matched 103 Moroccan phone numbers to potential targets between September and December 2017 alone — a three-month window. Of those, 65 were identifiable as civil society members: 34 human rights defenders, 22 journalists and media workers, five lawyers, and four academics. The first documented case was human rights lawyer Abdessadak El Bouchattaoui, whose number was entered into the Pegasus system in September 2017 and selected for targeting weeks before he received an infection link by text. The report's most granular detail concerns the integration of digital and physical methods. Safir described phone shops coopted to sell targets devices pre-infected with spyware, neighbours recruited as informants filing daily movement reports, and remote control systems deployed at internet cafes where field agents would identify a target's location to enable real-time access to machines already compromised. Journalist Omar Radi, who spent two years noticing battery drain, temperature spikes, and network slowdowns before Amnesty's Security Lab confirmed Pegasus infection in June 2020, described physical surveillance so routine that parking attendants and shopkeepers were debriefed daily. Activist Fouad Abdelmoumni was secretly filmed at home with his fiancée in 2021, footage Amnesty says was captured through a hidden camera in an air-conditioning unit based on the recording angle. Safir described this as a "textbook case" of a DGST surveillance and cleanup operation designed to leave no trace. The pattern extends beyond digital intrusion into what journalist Taoufik Bouachrine describes as a three-part destruction cycle: fabricated criminal cases (typically sexual misconduct charges in a conservative society), coordinated online smear campaigns, and the quiet severing of advertising revenue to starve independent outlets. Bouachrine's case illustrates the full cycle. Arrested in 2018 on charges of rape and human trafficking — charges he denies, attributing them to his journalism — he was sentenced to 15 years. The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention found his detention arbitrary and cited judicial harassment. The European Parliament passed a resolution calling for his release. He served more than six years before a royal pardon. By then, his newspaper Akhbar Al-Youm had closed after authorities cut off its advertising revenue. Morocco has consistently rejected Amnesty's allegations. Statements issued in 2020 and 2022 challenged Amnesty to provide material evidence. Moroccan media outlet Le360 argued that the presence of a phone number in Pegasus targeting records does not prove device infection or establish who ordered an attack — a technically valid point that leaves the broader pattern of physical surveillance, informant networks, and fabricated prosecutions unaddressed. Amnesty says it wrote to Moroccan authorities four weeks before publication and received no response. What makes this report structurally significant is the whistleblower dimension. Previous Pegasus reporting relied primarily on forensic phone analysis and leaked targeting lists. Safir's testimony, if accurate, provides the operational layer: how targets were selected, how devices were delivered, how physical and digital surveillance were coordinated, and how evidence was manufactured for prosecution. The integrity of the report rests substantially on the corroboration Amnesty claims to have performed — and on whether Safir's account withstands scrutiny from parties with standing to challenge it.
