Man Who Mocked The Saudi Leader Had His Phone Hacked And Was Beaten Up In London

A YouTuber who mocked Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman from his home in London had his phones hacked and was then beaten up outside Harrods by two men who warned him to stop talking sh*t about the Saudi Royal family online.

Ghanem Al-Masarir (also known as Ghanem Al-Dosari), a Saudi-born satirist and human rights activist, would crack jokes and criticise the Saudi royals from his flat in Wembley.

One day in 2018, al-Masarir noticed was that his phones were behaving weirdly. He also noticed they had become slow and his batteries were running out quickly.

Everywhere he went, he began seeing the same faces who would stop him in the street, harass him and whip out their phones and start filming him. He didn’t know who these people were or how they knew where he was all the time.

Eventually, he figured that his phone must’ve been hacked and was giving away his location. Cyber experts later confirmed his devices were being spied on with the Pegasus hacking tool.

Al-Masarir tells the BBC: “It was something that I couldn’t comprehend. They can see your location. They can turn on the camera. They can turn on the microphone, listen to you. They got your data, all pictures, everything. You feel you’ve been violated.”

One day he was outside Harrods in Knightsbridge, when two men approached demanding to know who he was to talk about the Saudi royal family. They then punched him in the face and continued to beat him up until passers-by intervened.

As the men retreated, they called Al-Masasir a “slave of Qatar” and said they were going to “teach him a lesson”.

Finally, after six years of legal battles, London’s High Court has ruled that Saudi Arabia was responsible for hacking and assaulting Ghanem Al-Masarir and awarded him £3 million in compensation, after finding “compelling” evidence that the kingdom targeted him for his YouTube videos mocking the Saudi royal family, particularly Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

The kingdom initially attempted to block the case by claiming state immunity, but this was rejected by the UK High Court in 2022.

Al-Masarir testified that the harassment, which included being followed and receiving death threats, left him severely depressed and forced him to stop producing content. Which is a shame because he’d managed to rack up 600,000 followers by that point.

I do wonder whether Saudi Arabia will actually bother to pay the man? I mean, I doubt anything would happen to them if they didn’t. Maybe they’ll invite him to the Saudi embassy in London to collect his compensation?

In the end, it sounds like they succeeded in silencing Ghanem Al-Masarir as his YouTube channel remains inactive. If I were him I’d avoid embassies, hotels, dark alleys, anywhere in any building on the planet that isn’t the ground floor, and bone saws from now on.

For the Saudi prince who sued Forbes after they undervalued his wealth by $9.6 billion, click HERE. That is a p1ss take, to be fair.