(Bloomberg) -- The United Nations is known for issuing bland pronouncements that skirt the differences among its member nations. Yet that didn’t stop two UN-appointed experts in Geneva from suggesting the powerful Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia may have been behind a hack of Jeff Bezos’s mobile phone.

The account was the joint work of two strong-willed specialists, known as special rapporteurs, for the UN Human Rights Council, who already have made their mark with outspoken assessments: Agnes Callamard, who conducted an investigation into the killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018, and David Kaye, who specializes in freedom of expression in the digital age.

In a statement on Wednesday, they said Bezos’s phone was hacked after the chief executive officer of Amazon.com Inc. had an exchange with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in 2018. They said Bezos’s mobile phone was infiltrated through an MP4 video file sent from the WhatsApp account used by the prince. Bezos owns the Washington Post.

“@AgnesCallamard & i regularly receive information from sources about serious human rights violations, from all over the world,” Kaye tweeted on Wednesday. “We are mandated by the @UNHumanRights to address credible allegations of violation.”

Kaye, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, has called out by name technology companies he says put user privacy at risk and spread false information. Callamard, a French human rights expert, researches summary executions and extrajudicial killings.

Callamard said in a report in June on Khashoggi’s death that while “no conclusion is made as to guilt,” there was “credible evidence, warranting further investigation of high-level Saudi officials’ individual liability, including the crown prince’s.”

While the Saudis have denied the crown prince approved the killing, Callamard wrote that “every expert consulted finds it inconceivable that an operation of this scale could be implemented without the Crown Prince being aware, at a minimum, that some sort of mission of a criminal nature, directed at Mr. Khashoggi, was being launched.”

She has been calling on UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and other UN bodies to follow her report with new steps to investigate the chain of command behind the Saudi operation. But UN leaders have thus far failed to take the investigation any further.

Her calls for the U.S. to investigate have been complicated by President Donald Trump’s close relationship with the Saudi royal family. Trump has said of the crown prince’s possible role in the killing “maybe he did and maybe he didn’t!”

To contact the reporter on this story: David Wainer in New York at dwainer3@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Bill Faries at wfaries@bloomberg.net, Larry Liebert, Justin Blum

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