‘Qatar politically and morally defeated boycotting countries’

Abdullah Al Athba, editor-in-chief Al-Arab newspaper, said that Qatar has emerged victorious politically and morally from its crisis with the boycotting countries.

In his interviews with Al Jazeera, he added that according to the evidence from the Interior Ministry, the hacking of the Qatar News Agency took place in cooperation with the UAE and began immediately after the Riyadh summit held to confront Iran and its support for terrorism.

He also noted that the evidence clearly indicated Emirates’ low level of browsing of the Qatari news agency before the hacking, and then showed a sudden spike in the readership of specific institutions. He added that although the boycotting countries tried to suggest that the news agency was difficult to hack, the American intelligence ultimately revealed the truth.

Al-Athba said that the next move for Qatar would be “the prosecutor general will take legal measures regarding the terrorist act committed against Qatar in order to achieve political objectives.”

Read: Gulf states are violating Qatar’s sovereignty

He mentioned that some of the fabricated news stories that were published on the news agency’s site while it was hacked aimed to destroy Qatar’s relationships with countries around the world. He explained that the centre of the attack on the news agency was the UAE. It was later revealed that a meeting was held and Emirati officials decided to hack the news agency.

“The hacking is a cyber terrorist act that was planned by hackers in order to demonise Qatar,” he said.