The WhatsApp hack which according to the Facebook-owned messaging app compromised the privacy of  121 Indians, mainly consisting of journalists, human rights activists by the Israeli spyware Pegasus had also attacked phones of leaders of Opposition including Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, said Congress spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala on Sunday.

In a press conference held on Sunday, Surjewala accused the ruling BJP party of spying on its citizens through cyber-attacks designed to secretly infiltrate their mobile phones.

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The individuals received alerts saying they were among more than 100 human rights campaigners whose phones were believed to have been hacked using malware sold by NSO Group, an Israeli cyberweapons company. The Congress leader also alleged that the Israeli spyware was sold only to the government and no one else.

Issuing the party statement on Twitter, Surjewala said, “Layers of BJP Govt’s conspiracy & collusion in the illegal & unconstitutional hacking of cell phones through surveillance software ‘Pegasus’ are unraveling everyday. BJP Govt is the deployer & executor of this illegal & unconstitutional snooping & spying racket.”

Layers of BJP Govt’s conspiracy & collusion in the illegal & unconstitutional hacking of cell phones through surveillance software ‘Pegasus’ are unraveling everyday.

BJP Govt is the deployer & executor of this illegal & unconstitutional snooping & spying racket.

Our Statement: pic.twitter.com/p5qbffgayC

— Randeep Singh Surjewala (@rssurjewala) November 3, 2019

Congress has alleged that the phones of three opposition leaders, including Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, were hacked by the government. West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee had made a similar claim on Saturday. Congress said, Praful Patel, a former Union minister from Sharad Pawar’s Nationalist Congress Party was also one of the politicians whose phone was hacked by the spyware.

“A perusal of the website of the NSO Group reflects that ‘Pegasus’ spyware and all NSO products are exclusively sold to Government only. In fact, NSO Group has written to ‘Citizen Lab’ (Munk School of University of Toronto) stating clearly that, ‘Our product is licenced to government and law enforcement agencies for the sole purpose of investing and preventing crime and terror. It is, thus, clear that Government of India and its agencies brought the spyware. It could neither be bought nor deployed by any private operator,” he said.

“When WhatsApp sent messages to all those whose phones were hacked, one such message was also received by Priyanka Gandhi Vadra,” senior Congress leader Randeep Surjewala told reporters this afternoon.

Priyanka Gandhi Vadra’s team claimed she did not take the message seriously and had deleted it. Only when Surjewala forwarded her the message from WhatsApp that was received by targeted users, she remembered she did receive one such message, sources said.

While IT Ministry officials confirmed that they had received a letter in September from WhatsApp stating that personal data of Indians was likely accessed by the spyware, they said the letter, which is not in the public domain, was “still too vague.”

The information about the September letter comes amidst claims by government sources that they were “disturbed” that the company had not brought the privacy breach of Indian citizens to their attention during the two meetings with the minister earlier this year. However, according to The Indian Express,  WhatsApp did inform the ministry about a privacy breach on the messaging platform, and responded to a notice issued by the Ministry of Information Technology two days ago, saying that besides notifying the government in May about a vulnerability in its service, it sent a letter in early September warning about the security breach.

WhatsApp launched an unprecedented lawsuit against the Israeli surveillance company earlier this week, claiming it had discovered more than 1,400 of its users around the world, were targeted by NSO technology in a two-week period in May.