A former Twitter employee was charged with acting as an agent of the Saudi Arabian government. An unsealed complaint lays out the details of the case against him.
By Betsy Morris Nov. 10, 2019 12:21 pm ET Ahmad Abouammo for years lived a Seattle lifestyle not unlike many of his neighbors. He owned a million dollar house, drove an Audi sport-utility vehicle and worked at Amazon.com Inc.
The complaint, filed in court Tuesday, alleges that the Saudi official—Mr. Al-Asaker, according to the person familiar with the case—carefully developed the contact with Mr. Abouammo and appears as the mastermind of the operation and the paymaster. The FBI also charged two other men— Ali Alzabarah and Ahmed Almutairi —with acting as illegal agents of a foreign government by providing private information about Twitter users to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
Mr. Abouammo began working at Twitter in San Francisco in late 2013 as a media partnerships manager for customers in the Middle East and North Africa, according to the criminal complaint. Mr. Abouammo, for instance, is accused of accessing in December 2014 the email address of a Twitter user that was a prominent critic of the Saudi government who had more than 1 million followers. He accessed the email information several more times in the following months, according to the government’s complaint.
Mr. Almutairi also managed the contact with the other charged Twitter employee, Mr. Alzabarah, according to the FBI. He began working for Amazon in 2015 soon after leaving Twitter, according to his LinkedIn profile. He stopped working at Amazon about a year ago. His last job at Amazon, similar to his role at Twitter, was as a media partnerships manager responsible for the Middle East and North Africa, according to his LinkedIn page.
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