UAE tried to ‘influence’ Tory ministers to ‘mislead’ the public, sacked embassy guard says in court papers

While Hurford, a former Royal Marine, admitted stealing confidential documents and money from the embassy in 2018, he denied plotting to blackmail the ambassador.

The blackmail trial was dropped, and the charge ordered to lie on file at a court hearing this month.

But the claims in Hurford’s defence statement have emerged just days after the UAE was accused of being behind spyware infecting phones at Downing Street and the Foreign Office in 2020 and 2021.

Citizen Lab, a research unit at the University of Toronto, contacted the British Government to warn that it had detected “multiple suspected instances of Pegasus spyware infections” at the departments. Pegasus is an Israeli surveillance software that can be secretly embedded on phones to access data, the camera and microphone.

A Pegasus operator linked to the UAE was among those thought potentially responsible, Citizen Lab said.

Last year, a British judge found Sheikh Mohammed ordered Pegasus to be used to hack the phones of his ex-wife, Princess Haya, and her British legal team, during their bitter divorce. The sheikh, who is also the ruler of Dubai, has always denied the hacking allegations.

Hurford’s legal bundle says that while a close protection officer until 2018 he “overheard conversations in meetings and saw correspondence” that gave him “a number of concerns regarding the conduct of the UAE”.