it was a successful operation but we found assistance from people living in saudi arabia and we had excellent intelligence at the attack is seriously damaged the economy of the enemy. talks have begun again in sudan with the killing of 5 protesters high on the agenda the ruling military council is blaming rogue elements for the violence on monday night but many protesters are rejecting the claim. sure lankans are under a nationwide curfew for a 2nd night as security forces tackle a wave of violence against muslims and which one person has died they have been attacks on mosques and muslim owned businesses in recent weeks after more than 250 people were killed in bombings on easter sunday all right you're up to date with headlines are not just a mix up it's risking it all. just

months after journalist jamal khashoggi it was killed in the saudi consulate in istanbul another arab dissident says his life he's also in danger. baghdad he is a pro-democracy activist and strong critic of saudi arabia's crown prince mohammed bin sound man the u.k.'s guardian newspaper reported that norwegian officials took him from his home in 00 to a secure location there he was told the cia had warned norway's government that the saudis had him in their crosshairs el baghdadi gained popularity during the arab spring when he posted pro human rights messages on social media the palestinian activist was granted asylum in norway 4 years ago after being expelled from the united arab emirates put his criticism of middle eastern regimes 5 jonah how in

oslo in an exclusive interview l baghdadi discusses an unlikely friendship with the murdered washington post journalist jamal for shoddy and have continuing his work has brought him into the crosshairs of the saudi government human rights campaigner el baghdadi talks to al-jazeera. he had a dandy thank you for talking to al-jazeera thank you so much for having me i'd like to go back a couple of weeks now to the 25th of april when you 1st got the knock on your door here in all slow telling you that there was a threat against you how did you react how did it happen. well to be honest i wasn't that surprised that they showed up. and i believe the 1st thing i said to them once they introduced themselves told me their badges was something like what took you so long. i remember on that day you know from the corner of my eye i could

see some activity outside they could see that i think they were standing there for a while. it seemed to me that this occurred the area before asking me to go with them norwegians the norwegians created the norway we call them the p.s.t. they're kind of a combination of norway's you know kind of see if the eye and security you know. special service you can see so they also provide security for politicians you know dignitaries. and they're known to be you know highly professional highly competent . so at the time of course they were in plain clothes and what did they tell you. they didn't tell me any details on the spot they simply asked me to go with them they didn't give you any sense of why there was a threat against you or where information had come from they only did that once i was safe and secure in that specialist secure location would do this and they simply sat me down and then they told me that they received a tip from a partner intelligence agency indicating that i've been the target of

a threat and you now believe that to be the cia and the threat to be coming from yes so there's a lot of the time i had a good i had a good. idea that it was the cia but i wasn't 100 percent sure and i believe i only this only was completely confirmed when the guardian did you know the work to confirm it and in the absence of real evidence to support this notion of a threat what gives you pause to think that it is credible that there is a real threat out there to start i think the you know whether whatever you think about this from a moral point of view i believe everyone would agree that there are competent. side . believe that this would have passed. if if there wasn't something behind it. but i should also mention that i started to become concerned about my security as far back as october. shortly after the murder is murder on october 15th i received

a friendly tip from a saudi source indicating that you know i'm being discussed and that i should be concerned about my security. he mentioned other names as well. you know i also inform them. but i didn't take any drastic action back then. in february while i was working with business as investigation team i became i mean i started to understand how sensitive that matter is and i started to feel i mean revisiting a lot of my old sources etc. i started to feel that i mean i don't want to be too dramatic but i felt like you know i have i probably have cross hairs on my back. and i did indicate my concern to a number of norwegian friends you know and in an e-mail that went around asking them for advice you know what you know someone who is in this kind of situation

what do you do where do you go. in march i filed a police report with the police with the local police which is the normal procedure when you want to you know when to and want to indicate something like that but i believe it was over a month over a month had passed before. the p.s.t. came to my door so it was october last year the same month that was killed that you began to feel somewhat under threat yourself and you were friends with him where you know. and you work together well yeah i mean initially of course i mean i tell people that someone like them all and i are not supposed to be friends we're not supposed to be friends the reason is for the longest time was one of the elites he was a figure who was deeply loyal he continued to be deeply loyal to the saudi state to the idea of saudi arabia. and for the longest time i mean within my team we had

a lot of frustration we had rants about sort of actually you know like the guy who almost gets it the guy who would say 10 things 10 positive 10 things about democracy and human rights and free expression 9 of them would be things that you would absolutely you know agree with and the 10th would walk it all back you know. and so i was always skeptical about that until that moment when he chose exile. and something really amazing happened after that which was that one was unshackled from having to be concerned about his security and about you know his his safety once he was safe reasonably in the united states. he could have gone in any direction he could have gone to words you know he could have one of his dreams was to start his own t.v. station or could have done that he could have you know gotten

a pretty decent position at a think tank for example in d.c. . eventually he chose 2 things 1st journalism his 1st you know his 1st identity and he gravitated towards activists was used to some kind of normal politics he was used to the old saudi arabia which had some kind of norms and some kind of traditions of how things happen. as completely destroyed that and the end of normal politics eventually meant that you have to seek other ways of seeking influence. and i think that's how he that's when he started to gravitate towards activism m.b.'s. of course the crown prince in saudi arabia. eventually you found common cause with jamal khashoggi do you think that it was your association with him. that 1st put you on the radar of the saudi authorities to attempt to answer your question. we did

a risk assessment and we identified 6 or 7 reasons of 6 or 7 things that i've been working on you and he not with jamal i mean generally i mean 3 of these or 2 of these were but the rest were basically other initiatives that were highly sensitive and i believe from my own informed opinion would have been highly you know of concern let's see if 22 to the saudis well you knew you knew that what you were doing had the potential to get you in trouble you tweeted if they don't want to kill me then i'm not doing my job is the risk the danger something that you accept as simply being an inherent in what you do it is something that i accept i mean this is i mean it's not the easiest life but it is the life that i built and it's the life that i chose so let's talk about the period then after jamal khashoggi death in the saudi consulate in istanbul last october you took on along

with these who's also been warned at the same time as you he lives in canada there's another individual who lives in the united states also warned by security services of the threat the 3 of you took on jamal's work and tried to carry it on and that's what brought you into contact with the i was in founder jeff bezos give me a sense of of how events unfolded after june miles death and how they involved your work so as a man was very concerned about the state of free expression the main medium of free expression. in the arab world post 2011 was social media particularly twitter i think the nature of twitter. the fact that twitter is this unfiltered you know there's no algorithm or the algorithm is very light. and the fact that twitter became very very popular in saudi arabia i think saudi arabia and certain and certain. certain surveys tops the world when it comes to an attrition rate went up

supporter. jamal himself was a twitter influencer as you know i mean he had i think 1600000 for something like that as we saw a 1000000 followers i mean i'm nowhere near his influence on twitter i mean under that keep in mind also that he's influential in the arabic language which is the language that for safety i avoided even though i enjoy speaking i mean and communicating in arabic it just happens that there were far more aggressive with arabic speakers because they wanted to control the arab public sphere ok so you identified twitter as the sort of main battleground it was the main battleground the main i mean i remember as far back as 2011 someone called twitter the parliament of the arabs it is where arabs go to express their opinion it is where arabs go to to get informed. likely exactly so take me on. in how you went about picking up where jamal left off trying to finish what it was he'd started. you might be aware of the project. was working on and of course is

a project that was structured in association was about actually. and the idea behind it is you know these guys the saudi regime they weaponize twitter they manipulate the media they manipulate the platform in order to do really dark things and to just to fight really dark things why don't we do the same but in the in the opposite direction in other words why don't we also manipulate twitter to push our own narratives which are basically you know pro freedom pro profit off expression pro-human rights etc. so that was one line of attack and i would i would mention here that i have a certain philosophical difference let's say with this approach of course i was not involved in that project at all but i have this philosophical difference because i think maybe fighting fire with fire is not the best strategy because they simply have so much more fire. the 2nd approach i mean there's 3 approaches i

prefer not to mention the 3rd approach at least for the meanwhile because it's very much a work in progress and it's highly sensitive and it's starting to bear fruit. but i would mention the 2nd one with the 2nd one basically was. jamal's desire to create. what we eventually came to describe as an arab state media watchdog. so he actually gave me a call i believe it was if i'm not mistaken it was august 7th. and this was after or after we had communicated about the 3rd project after i had made some connections that we needed. but in that conversation he he summarized the idea he said you know these guys push a lot of propaganda a lot of it is outrageous and a lot of it they get away with it because they say it in the arabic language and

there isn't enough awareness in the world that you know this is actually happening so he's like why don't we create this project that actually exposes the so what they do is that they segment the audience so they send a message in english there's another message in arabic why don't we cross translate so that people can see that this is what's happening and we can actually keep an eye a spotlight on their propaganda efforts what they're doing what they're saying etc and he said like some some of it would be funny. in a dark kind of way like like look how you know ridiculous the serbs and some of it would be incredibly important incredibly important for you know for understanding you know these regimes and of course he talked about this not only to me but also to the 3rd unnamed. person in the united states in the united states and of course i understood from my comment like from my subsequent you know work on this i understood that twitter is an integral part of such a project so it's wasn't it doesn't have to be simply t.v.

and press twitter is an enormous it's actually the primary propaganda tool for you know when it comes to saudi arabia. to spend a lot of time a lot of money and they actually spilled a lot of blood to maintain to create that kind of control which actually they're very proud of and we have a lot of evidence that they're very proud of their degree of control that they have over arabic twitter what do you mean they spilled a lot of blood i mean that there are people and i mean i can't mention names here but i think one of the this will be the this will come out 1st of all a lot of the people who are arrest. as early as september 27th teen. of course they had a crossfire as intellectuals some of the more scholars and so troubled i think it's also important to note that there also were twitter influencers in fact we tabulated i mean we had for him you were talking about the saudi authorities killing people who had become influential on twitter i mean some i was one of them

but there were there were there are cases that we're aware of people who were tortured to death. and not to going to the names but tortured to death and we cannot find anything that they were doing other than twitter and this is evidence backed. unfortunately yes and we don't have as i mentioned we don't we don't want to reveal the names yet you know until we have something official we're expecting that maybe there will be an official. college went off of this at some point but there has been reporting on it ok so twitter is your battle ground in which you and people like you operate to counter the propaganda of regimes among them saudi arabia. jamal khashoggi is killed you and 2 others take on projects that you were working with together. bring me then up to the point where you working with jeff bezos and you begin to feel. vulnerable. yes so

the general idea or the general methodology. off the 2nd project is something that we had an idea about what would we never had a tar like we never tried it out in a real life investigation. this of course kind of changed when the business blackmail scandal became public the founder of amazon so the founder of amazon and also interestingly importantly the owner of the washington post owner of the employer for short of his phone was tapped allegedly. embarrassing. tweets e-mails it's off its main mainly you know pictures and messages that were lifted off his phone. and i i mean i don't want to get into details that probably i should not mention i mean there's a lot i know about the case that. i should not be. i should not be speaking publicly about them. but the short story here is that jeff bezos after the murder

of washington post journalist. was in a bit of a bind because this is a man who has has extensive business interests in saudi arabia he had by then a personal relationship with m.p.'s had met him several times yes. but he was also the owner of the washington post and m.b.'s just killed one of his journalists. and he was in this kind of situation where it was clear it was it became clear to us even even more you know with the investigation that m.p.'s expected basis to side with him over the washington post and to say you know you know my business comes 1st. and you know i have a personal relationship with this man and he expected him to curb the washington post coverage that's of course not happen and jeff bezos basically when he bought

the washington post and 2013 he had a good faith agreement that i'm not going to interfere in editorial policy i'm not going to enter the boardroom and he ordered that and this was something sadly this was something exactly this was something that m.b.a.'s saw as betrayal and so you were called in to help identify the source of the leaks my role was basically aiding the investigation team in. first of all exposing the degree and the the the saudi campaigns against jeff bezos. but also the timing of a lot of these things that happened and of course it fell upon jeff this investigation team to actually go in and find out exactly what happened and it was conclusive. it was there i mean according i mean to quote them to paraphrase they concluded with a high degree of certainty that's what that's that's according to them that the saudis had access to a source for sure there's

a lot of work going on here. on your behalf. and the other individuals in the united states following on from jamal's who are aiming to point the figure finger not just at the saudi authorities but n.b.s. himself the crown prince himself one thing that seems to be lacking in indeed also lacking in pointing the finger at n.b.s. in the death of jamal khashoggi he's. categorical undeniable evidence direct evidence he's in of all of this yet you take it as read you speak as though it is a fact based. thing. if there is no direct evidence mustn't you and others accept that there is the possibility that n.b.s. in fact did not have any direct role or knowledge that's really these things i mean that's that's a really interesting question i mean some people misunderstand circumstantial evidence so that the actual idea of circumstantial evidence i mean if i walk out if i'm out in outside and you're sitting inside and i walk in and i have you can see

that i'm wet you can assume that it was raining outside and i have an umbrella for example you can assume that it was raining but that was not direct evidence is circumstantial it doesn't mean that it's weak evidence it simply means that it's not direct in a case of as they said before a highly pick regime which has control over information it is very rare that you will actually find direct evidence maybe it could be years before you find direct evidence and this is something they know and this is something that the they use to as i said you know drum loops around us really i mean they can't they can basically be months or running years ahead of us. which unfortunately in many cases they have they have been i would point out however that in a country like saudi arabia with which is ruled by an absolute monarch and he's and he's absolutely probably i don't think there's another country in the world in which. one person has such direct control over everything

in the state. it is simply impossible to think that. such such a thing as a miles murder could have been done without his knowledge and this was in fact the conclusion of the cia. to a medium to high level of probability absolutely with i mean what are the argument the use that it is it is almost impossible for something like this to happen without knowledge and yet all of this said and with all the cumulative work that you and others continue to do. it remains an unassailable fact that m.b.a.'s at this point in some of the crown prince retains the. support of president trump. the banks and the investors who pulled away from saudi arabia very publicly in the months following jamal's murder have trickled back there are simply too much money there for them not to the spotlight shifts inexorably to

saudi arabia is iran in the arab world and so it is unlikely or seems unlikely that n.b.s. is ever going to go the way of the. mubarak's or the gadhafi is or the omar al bashir is of this world is that true do you think i mean i think that the chances of a popular uprising in saudi arabia is not as as you mentioned is not. doesn't have a history of popular uprisings but then again i mean libya for example didn't help on. syria until recent recently i mean didn't have one. so i would caution against you know being complacent about about you know what is that point at which the people simply say enough however i completely agree with you and everything else the fact that. the administration in the in this world that is most capable of reining in m.b.'s is currently his biggest enabler i'm

talking about trump but also importantly jarrett questioner. i mean my own sources indicate that u.s. institutions including intel including you know congress obviously are very much aware that n.b.s. is bad news but then there's the other angle which is that saudi arabia is verifiable absolutely an important country it will continue to be an important country so this presents a very interesting policy condron really to the world which is that we need saudi arabia. it's an interesting market it's also an important country for strategic reasons. dynamic young population you know traumatized probably after after the recent events but still important but then we also have this guy who is bad news what do we do about it i mean this is this is absolutely a conundrum your current situation at the moment under threat you're aware of a threat how do you proceed now undeterred or cautiously. well

on the one hand it's clear i mean the fact that there's been this threat and you mentioned you quoted me earlier saying you know if they don't want to kill me then i'm not doing my job. in a way when they come after you that's when you know that you're being effective to know that you hit a nerve in other words. you know i think the of course again i mean they went after a lot of people that were a lot more accessible to them such as people who are living in saudi arabia and these people of course. you know i have the highest respect for their courage but also the biggest the most concern for the safety. but knowing that you have a certain effectiveness that would prompt them to try to deter you to stop you really is validation it's validation and it's basically a message saying that you know i need to double down my efforts. but danny that's all the time we have thank you so much for talking to others if thank you.

one of the most mob make you and i'm the one that is under threats from an agonizing. 111 can't pretend he's dedicating your life to say. what i want to east makes the woman respond. this is the opportunity to understand the very different way we're there before we don't leave. russia has jeopardized the united states security interests we know what you are doing and you will not. 60 perceptions from the outside looking. more to the

picture from the inside. i think russia's foreign policy is too soft. to most russian goals have you achieved not pieces of useful russia on al-jazeera. al-jazeera. and. the us is a tipping point scientists are telling us right now that we have just 12 years as the world's leaders to agree upon a solution people are taking matters into their. with its actions to get people to understand that it kills people and it kills people.

both sides with the people's doors on al-jazeera. protesters are demanding an independent investigation into monday's violence which killed 6 people. along the clogged this is al jazeera live from doha also coming up but they met to bridge differences but america's top diplomats in the russian foreign minister don't see eye to eye on several issues including their own. security clampdown on venezuela's opposition controlled national assembly and accusations of crimes against humanity against zuma during. a 2nd night of nationwide curfew comes into force i'm sure likers please try to.