# Al Jazeera Investigative Unit — "Bangladesh bought Cellebrite phone-hacking tools from Israel, documents show" (Mar 8 2021) > *This is a March 8, 2021 investigation by Al Jazeera's Investigative Unit (with Haaretz), based on documents the unit obtained — including from the Bangladesh home ministry's own website — showing that Bangladesh spent at least $330,000 on Cellebrite UFED phone-extraction equipment and that nine Criminal Investigations Department officers trained in Singapore in 2019, while the notorious Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) — a paramilitary force with a documented record of abductions, torture and disappearances — was slated for training on Cellebrite's systems. It is the strongest documentary source for the Cellebrite–Bangladesh–RAB record. It matters to the Arkansas surveillance investigation because Cellebrite (phone extraction; distinct from NSO Group / Pegasus spyware) is among the surveillance vendors adopted by Arkansas law-enforcement agencies, and this report grounds the vendor's documented sales to a force notorious for human-rights abuses.* ## Source metadata - **Publisher:** Al Jazeera Investigative Unit (I-Unit), ajiunit.com - **URL:** https://www.ajiunit.com/article/bangladesh-cellebrite-phone-hacking-tools-israel/ - **Archived:** 2026-06-07 via firecrawl_scrape - **Tier:** 3 (established investigative journalism) ## Extract — verbatim (lightly cleaned) > Documents obtained by Al Jazeera's Investigative Unit (I-Unit) and Israeli newspaper Haaretz reveal how the Bangladesh government spent at least $330,000 on phone-hacking equipment made by an Israeli company, even though the two countries do not have diplomatic relations. > Developed by the Cellebrite security firm, UFED is a product that is capable of accessing and extracting data from a wide range of mobile phones. Its ability to hack encrypted phone data has worried civil rights campaigners, who have long called for its use to be more strictly regulated. > Bangladesh does not recognise the state of Israel, forbids trade with it and prevents its citizens from travelling there. ... It is unclear whether UFED was provided to Bangladesh directly by the Israeli company or via a Cellebrite subsidiary based elsewhere in the world, presumably with the intention to mask its origins. **Training in Singapore** > The latest documents obtained by I-Unit, which Al Jazeera also found on the Bangladesh home ministry's own website, relate to contracts signed in 2018 and 2019. They are from the Public Security Division, a department in the Ministry of Home Affairs ... whose agencies include the Bangladesh police force and border guards. > The paperwork details how nine officers from the country's Criminal Investigations Department were given the approval to travel to Singapore in February 2019 to receive training on UFED to allow them to unlock and extract data from mobile phones. It outlines how the Bangladeshi staff would ultimately qualify as Cellebrite Certified Operators and Cellebrite Certified Physical Analysts. > The documents also say the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), a paramilitary force that has a well-documented record of abductions, torture and disappearances, would be trained on the usage of Cellebrite's hacking systems under an ongoing project that began in 2019 and is set to be completed in June 2021. **Halting exports to Bangladesh** > Eitay Mack, an Israeli human rights lawyer ... explained how intrusive the technologies that Bangladesh has bought from Israel really are. "You're able to take all information about the person's life, about their relationships, medical records, name of friends and in the case of journalists the names of a source," Mack told Al Jazeera. "In the case of Hong Kong, the police used Cellebrite's systems to access the phones of 4,000 protesters." > Cellebrite eventually stopped its exports to Hong Kong after public outcry and a court case brought by Mack. Now, he is doing the same with Bangladesh. On Monday, Mack filed a petition with the Israeli courts, asking them to retract the export licenses of Cellebrite and Picsix to Bangladesh. > "Even if a company like Cellebrite or Picsix has branches operating in Singapore, it's still under Israeli law," Mack told Al Jazeera. "As long as the company is owned by Israeli citizens they need an export license from the Ministry of Defence." > I-Unit reached out to the Bangladesh Ministry of Home Affairs as well as Cellebrite. Neither provided any comments at the time of publication.