Al-Masarir’s iPhones had been hacked in 2018 after he clicked on links in three text messages seemingly sent from news outlets as special membership offers.<\/p>\n
It led to him being stalked, harassed and in August of that year, beaten up in central London.<\/p>\n
The court heard two strangers had approached al-Masarir and shouted at him, demanding to know who he was to talk about the Saudi royal family, before punching him in the face and then continuing to attack him.<\/p>\n
Passers-by intervened and the two men retreated, calling the YouTuber a “slave of Qatar” and saying they were going to “teach him a lesson”.<\/p>\n
The High Court judge described the physical attack as premeditated and noted that one of the assailants was wearing an earpiece.<\/p>\n
“There is a compelling basis” that the assault and the hack “was directed or authorised by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia or agents acting on its behalf,” Mr Justice Saini said in his written judgement.<\/p>\n
“The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia had a clear interest in and motivation to shut down the claimant’s public criticism of the Saudi government,” the judge ruled.<\/p>\n
After the assault, the harassment continued. In 2019, a child approached al-Masarir at a Kensington caf\u00e9 and sang a song praising King Salman, the Saudi monarch.<\/p>\n
This incident was filmed and posted on social media, began trending with its own hashtag, and was even broadcast on state-owned television in Saudi Arabia.<\/p>\n
On the same day, a man walked up to al-Masarir as he was leaving a west London restaurant and told him, “Your days are numbered”, before walking off.<\/p>\n
Al-Masarir was born in Saudi Arabia but has lived in Britain for more than 20 years, originally coming to study in Portsmouth.<\/p>\n
He is now a British citizen and lives in Wembley, but no longer ventures far from home – going into central London is still frightening for him after he was attacked.<\/p>\n
The 45-year-old rose to fame in the Arabic-speaking world for his satirical YouTube videos criticising Saudi rulers, in particular the crown prince and de facto ruler Mohamed bin Salman.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Al-Masarir’s iPhones had been hacked in 2018 after he clicked on links in three text messages seemingly sent…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":400000,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":{"0":"post-399999","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399999","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=399999"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399999\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/400000"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=399999"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=399999"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=399999"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}