Responding to a media report of Israel's left-leaning newspaper Haaretz regarding the purchase of advanced spy tech from the country, Bangladesh Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan has not denied that the government purchased the spyware but said it did not do so “directly” from Israel.
The home minister's comment was in the latest report of Haaretz published on Wednesday quoting the Bangladeshi daily New Age.
A similar response came from Maj Gen Ziaul Ahsan, director general of the National Telecommunication Monitoring Center (NTMC), a government body that purchased the Israeli systems, reports Haaretz.
A top home ministry official told New Age: “The ministry had no scope to procure any items ‘directly' from Israel, but the government definitely wanted to upgrade its surveillance system to protect the nation and its ‘security'.”
“We need to see whether these technologies are being abused or not,” the official said.
Using official Bangladeshi government documents and international export records, Haaretz revealed on Tuesday that four companies – either Israeli or registered abroad but with a clear Israeli connection – sold Bangladesh advanced monitoring systems through intermediaries in Cyprus, Singapore and Switzerland.
The report said the equipment, which is used to intercept mobile and internet traffic, was sold to the National Telecommunication Monitoring Center (NTMC), a department of the home ministry.
It did so despite the country's chronically poor human rights record and the fact that Bangladesh – the world's third-largest Muslim country – does not recognize Israel, said the report.
The systems were sold to Bangladeshi government agencies that have been implicated in human rights violations, enabling them to monitor network traffic, hack into wireless networks, and track, intercept and extract information from mobile devices, according to the report.
Israel's defence ministry did not respond explicitly to Haaretz's queries about how the companies cited in the investigation were supervised and if the sales to Bangladesh were approved.
This is not the first Israeli surveillance tech reported ending up in Bangladesh.
In 2021, Al Jazeera reported that Israeli-made surveillance equipment used to monitor mobile phones was bought by Bangladesh in 2018 using a Bangkok-based mediator. The technology in that deal was provided by a company called Picsix.
Cellebrite, another Israeli firm, sold surveillance tech to the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) in 2021, according to Haaretz.
Cyprus has become a central hub for the spyware and surveillance tech industry, with the European Parliament's Committee of Inquiry investigating the use of Pegasus and equivalent surveillance spyware in November finding that “on paper, there is a robust legal framework, including EU rules, but in practice, Cyprus is an attractive place for companies selling surveillance technologies”.
Israeli spyware and surveillance tech have been in the spotlight in recent years after scandals surrounding the use of technology from the NSO Group, Candiru and other Israeli companies by governments around the world to target activists, politicians and journalists.