New Delhi: Despite an ostensible ban on accepting bids from Israel, Bangladesh purchased at least four separate advanced surveillance equipment by Israeli firms, including from a company owned by a former Israeli intelligence officer, a new investigation by Haaretz newspaper has found.
The third-largest Muslim-majority country in the world, Bangladesh has no diplomatic relations with Israel. However, in 2021, Bangladesh quietly dropped the language in the passport that barred the bearer of the Bangladeshi travel document from going to Israel.
According to Haaretz, Israeli companies are also formally banned from doing business with Bangladesh. The South Asian country is not on the list of countries approved by Israel’s defence ministry for the export of classified technology. The reason cited by the newspaper, based on sources in Israel’s cyber industry, is over concerns that the technology “will fall into the hand of Pakistan”.
Besides, the newspaper also raised concern that some of the Bangladesh security agencies, receiving the spyware technology, had been accused of human rights violations. For example, the top leadership of the paramilitary Rapid Action Battalion was the target of US sanctions for their alleged role in the torture and disappearances of thousands of people.
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The Israeli newspaper cited documents from Cyprus and Bangladesh to document four purchases of Israeli spy technology worth over $12 million by Bangladeshi military and security agencies between 2019 and 2022.
This is in addition to the purchases reported in 2019 and 2021 of Bangladesh military intelligence and Rapid Action Battalion of mobile phone interception and hacking tools from two Israeli companies.
According to Haaretz’s investigation, the largest purchase was of a “spy van” worth $5.7 million, supplied by Passitora to Bangladesh’s National Telecommunication Monitoring Center (NTMC) in June 2022.
“Export records show that in June 2022, a SpearHead system was delivered from Switzerland to the Bangladeshi capital of Dhaka. The supplier was Passitora, and the buyer was NTMC. The shipment, weighing 991 kilograms, included the interception system, operating software and hardware components (servers, drives, monitors, etc.) at a total cost of $5.7 million,” said the report.
Bangladesh PM Sheikh Hasina. In the background is a protest against the recent anti-Hindu violence, in Bangladesh. Photos: Reuters and Twitter/@albd1971
Registered in Cyprus, Passitora is owned by Tal Dilian, an Israeli businessman and former commander in Israeli defence forces, who figured in a New York Times investigation about the global spyware industry.
When Passitora was previously known as WiSpear, Dilian told Forbes about his new product, Spearhead systems, a van that can intercept mobile phones, including WhatsApp messages, within a radius of about half a kilometre. This interview led him eventually to leave Cyprus due to political furore and move his firm to Greece.
As per cabinet records uploaded by Haaretz, the Bangladeshi cabinet decided that a Switzerland-based Toru Group had won the bid for “Vehicle Mounted Mobile Interceptor and related services” in June 2021.
Swiss company records show no Toru group is based in the European country. However, a company with that name was registered in the British Virgin Islands, with a Geneva address of a firm that provides foreign registration services for companies.
Haaretz reported that, as per three sources, Toru Group, headed by an Israeli citizen, “acted as a middleman for various deals with Dilian’s firms”.
Bangladesh home ministry’s records permission was given to the NTMC commander and other senior officials to fly to Greece in September 2021 and January 2022 for training by Toru Group. The trip was “fully funded” by the Toru group. According to the investigative report, Tal Dilian had moved his firm to Athen from Cyprus by then.
“NTMC’s budget shows that the system was expected to arrive in Bangladesh in mid-2022. Shipping documents show that the system was delivered at the end of June,” said the report.
It also cited sources as stating that seven police officers who allegedly criticised the government in a secret WhatsApp group and were in contact with the leaders of the opposition Bangladesh National Party (BNP) were sacked due to surveillance by the new spy van.
Another 2019 document of the Bangladesh Prime Minister’s Office showed that a team of four officials went to Cyprus to inspect the purchase by Bangladesh’s internal intelligence agency NSI of a system to intercept Wi-Fi networks from a company called “Prelysis Communication and Information Systems Ltd”.
Registered in both Cyprus and Israel, Prelysis is headed by an Israeli citizen Kobi Naveh.
Further, Haaretz reported that Cyprus’s export records showed that the Bangladesh military received a consignment of equipment for “active monitoring of mobile phones” for $1.6 million. The supplier was Singapore-based Coralco Tech, headed by Israeli Eyal Almog.
Besides, another Cyprus-registered company U-TX Technologies supplied a “Web Intelligence” system to NTMC in 2019 and a cellular tracking system for military intelligence, in 2021, per Cypriot export records. Israeli citizens also own the firm.
According to Haaretz, no response was received from Bangladesh’s Interior and Foreign Ministries about the purchase of spyware from Israeli firms. Passitora and Toru Group also did not comment. U-TX, which operates under the name Cognyte, also didn’t respond.
Coralco Tech declined to comment on the identity of its client, but stated all deals are “fully reported while attaining the proper licenses from the regulatory bodies, including Israel’s Defense Ministry”. Besides, Prelysis’s Naveh said he “cannot respond” when asked whether Israel’s defence ministry had given the green light for the deal with Bangladesh.
In answer to the query on whether it approved spyware sales to Bangladesh, the Israeli defence ministry stated that it “acts, and will act, to enforce unapproved defence exports, including services and know-how – according to its legal authority. As a rule, the ministry does not divulge information on the defence export policy, for security, diplomatic and strategic considerations”.