Srinagar: Phone numbers of former Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Mehbooba Mufti's family, Kashmiri politicians, separatist leaders and journalists were selected as possible targets for phone surveillance between 2017 and 2019, online news portal The Wire said on Friday.
The Wire, part of a 17-member global investigative media consortium, reported that two family members of Mufti were found on a list of people who could potentially be targeted by Pegasus, an Israeli military grade spyware to infiltrate phones for snooping and surveillance.
Their names were chosen months before Mufti's coalition government collapsed after the Bharatiya Janata Party withdrew support.
Sharing the link of The Wire's story, Mufti said in a tweet: “A spyware used against terrorists has been weaponised to deal with political opponents & dissenters. BJP has taken a leaf out of how Britishers would suspect & treat Indians during the colonial era. GOI has gone rogue & is brazenly subverting basic human rights.”
Mufti, who is now a trenchant critic of the BJP and part of an alliance pushing for the restoration of the region's statehood and special status, told The Wire that surveillance, as a concept, was not new for Kashmiris.
