Following the apparent disappearance and murder of Washington Post columnist James Khashoggi, wherein Khashoggi visited the Saudi Arabian embassy and is thought to have been tortured, interrogated, and murdered by assassins waiting inside, speculation has arisen as to whether an audio recording of the murder was caught by Khashoggi’s Apple Watch.
The Apple Watch, noted as an LTE Series 3 that he’d been seen wearing in public before, is speculated to have been synced and within Bluetooth range of his iPhone, which was in the possession of Khashoggi’s fiancee, Hatice Cengiz. Cengiz was waiting outside the consulate during the exchange, assumedly within Bluetooth range of the Apple Watch in question.
At this time, there is no clear explanation as to how the audio was transferred to Khashoggi’s iPhone, or how the data found its way to Apple’s iCloud servers.
Following the encounter, continuing reports claim that the Saudis responsible gained access to the Apple Watch and deleted certain files on the device. This suggests the so-called “hit squad” confiscated the journalist’s iPhone from Cengiz, something that has gone unconfirmed.
Per the Daily Mail, it appears that while the group was able to wipe certain files from Khashoggi’s Apple Watch and/or iPhone, they may have been less successful in deleting files that had been sent to the iCloud.
Other technical obstacles have also been cited, especially since embassies are highly secure facilities, with host governments going to great efforts to control RF emissions, signals, and data that either enters or exits the site. This is generally achieved through heavy RF shielding, which an Apple Watch Series 3 or 4’s Bluetooth, being a low energy device, would have a hard time overcoming.
Also, if Khashoggi was allowed to connect to the consulate Wi-Fi, that would be one of the largest breaches of embassy RF and data security ever recorded. This seems especially improbable.
The “Apple Watch angle” could in fact be part of a disinformation campaign element of the story, which is being investigated on its own end.
Stay tuned for additional details as they become available.
Via The New York Times, AppleInsider, and the Daily Mail