Rabat, Morocco (AP) —The Moroccan government reports that state security forces may have used spyware manufactured by the Israeli NSO group to eavesdrop on mobile phones of the French president and other public figures. I denied it.

In a statement late Tuesday, the Moroccan government denounced a global media consortium investigating alleged widespread use of NSO’s Pegasus spyware targeting journalists, human rights activists and politicians in multiple countries. The government threatened to take unspecified legal action.

Le Monde, a member of the consortium, said that President Emmanuel Macron’s mobile phone and the 15 members of the French government at the time were potential targets for surveillance by Pegasus spyware on behalf of Moroccan security agencies. Reported that it could have been one.

French public broadcaster Radio France reported that the telephone of King Mohammed VI of Morocco and members of his aides were also potential targets.

“The Kingdom of Morocco has strongly condemned large-scale, malicious media campaigns that are persistently false,” the statement said. The government “rejects these false, unfounded claims and demands that their merchants … provide concrete and material evidence to support their surrealistic story.”

The consortium has identified possible targets from a leak list of over 50,000 mobile numbers obtained by Paris-based journalism nonprofit Forbidden Stories and human rights group Amnesty International.

Members of the consortium said they were able to link more than 1,000 numbers on the list to individuals. Most were in Mexico and the Middle East.

The consortium did not attempt to hack the device just because the data contained a phone number, but said the consortium believed that the data pointed to potential targets for NSO government clients. It was.

The list also includes phone numbers for Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Morocco and Rwanda, as well as phone numbers for members of the Arab royal family, heads of state and prime ministers, the consortium reported.

The Paris prosecutor’s office is investigating alleged use of spyware, and French experts are calling for increased security on mobile phones of prominent officials.

The NSO Group denied maintaining a “list of potential, past, or existing targets.” It called the forbidden story report “full of false assumptions and unsubstantiated theories.”

The cause of the leak and its authentication method have not been clarified.