NEW YORK: A US court has found former Twitter employee Ahmad Abouammo guilty of obtaining the personal data of some Twitter users and giving the data to Saudi Arabian government officials.

Abouammo and Ali Alzabarah -- two Twitter employees -- and Ahmed Almutairi, alias Ahmed Aljbreen, a Saudi national, were accused in 2019 with working as unregistered Saudi government agents in the US.

In connection with a federal inquiry, Abouammo was also charged with fabricating, deleting, or changing records.
Abouammo now faces up to 20 years in jail after being found guilty by a jury in a San Francisco court of conspiring to commit wire fraud, fabricating records, and money laundering. 

The prosecution said throughout the trial that a powerful official in Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's administration asked Abouammo for assistance in looking into his rivals.

Jamal Khashoggi, a journalist for the Washington Post, a resident of Virginia, and a vocal opponent of the regime, was killed and dismembered by Saudi government agents in 2018, as per The Verge report.

The US Department of Justice filed a complaint alleging that between November 2014 and May 2015, Almutairi, 30, of Saudi Arabia, and foreign representatives of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia persuaded Abouammo and Alzabarah to use their employee login information to gain unauthorised access to specific nonpublic information about the people behind specific Twitter accounts.

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