Iran press/ Asia: In a joint operation with the Anti-Terrorism Branch of the Istanbul Police Department, the agency’s counterintelligence unit apprehended seven people who all confessed to working for Mossad in their testimonies, according to information gathered by the Sabah newspaper.
According to MIT, the seven suspects are among the 56 operatives linked to a total of nine networks, each overseen by nine Mossad agents based in Tel Aviv and able to operate on an international scale.
Documents from MIT revealed that the spies were gathering biographical intelligence on foreign nationals through an online routing method, tracking vehicle movements via GPS, hacking into password-protected networks based on Wi-Fi devices, and finding private locations.
The operatives also physically followed specific targets determined by Mossad to surveil and photograph one-on-one meetings, an operation supervised by an Israeli of Arab origin, Soliman Agbaria.
The cell, consisting of citizens from various Middle Eastern countries, used several fake websites in multiple languages, chiefly Arabic, to obtain technical locations and confirmed IP addresses, MIT discovered.
All communication between Mossad agents in Türkiye and abroad was done through single-use mobile phone lines owned by fake persons in Spain, England, Germany, Sweden, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Belgium.
One of the group’s leaders, a Mossad spy codenamed “Shirin Alayan” whose actual identity MIT was unable to determine, used a German phone line to instruct a Palestinian named “Khaled Nijim” to set up bogus news platforms like “najarland.com, almeshar.com, Nasrin-news.com, and hresource.co.uk.” These websites featured exclusively pinpoint articles to attract targets who would then click on virus links, enabling the network to infiltrate their phones.
The Istanbul unit of the network was provided cyber training and technical support remotely by Priyanshi Patel Kulhari, the 24-year-old owner of Tel Aviv-based spy software firm Cyberintelligence International Private Ltd, MIT said.
Kulhari, who was in constant contact with the Mossad spies, determined how to infiltrate targeted phones and which news articles would be pushed for the target to click.
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