Qatari Diplomats Killed In Car Crash

CAIRO (AP) — Three Qatari diplomats were killed in a car crash Saturday while heading to Egypt’s Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, health officials said.

Two other diplomats were injured when their vehicle overturned about 50 kilometers (31 miles) from Sharm el-Sheikh, the officials said.

The diplomats, who were from the Qatari protocol team, were traveling to the city ahead of a high-level summit celebrating a ceasefire in the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, the officials said. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief media.

Qatar mediated the ceasefire along with Egypt and the U.S. Turkey also joined the negotiations earlier this month in Sharm el-Sheikh, which was capped by a ceasefire and the release of hostages and hundreds of Palestinian prisoners.

Sharm el-Sheikh will host the summit to be co-chaired by President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi of Egypt and U.S. President Donald Trump, according to a statement from the Egyptian presidency.

The statement said more than two dozen world leaders, including French President Emmanuel Macron, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and United Nations Secretary General António Guterres will attend the summit.

Of all the Mercedes Benzs in the world, the one carrying a delegation of "Qatari Diplomats" heading to a peace conference has a steering wheel malfunction?

What a strange "coincidence."

Oct. 12, 2025, 1:19 AM MDT / Source: Reuters

CAIRO — Three employees of Qatar's Amiri Diwan, its top government body, were killed in a car crash near Egypt’s Red Sea resort city of Sharm el-Sheikh, Qatar's embassy in Egypt said in a post on X on Sunday.

The embassy said two others were wounded and were receiving necessary medical treatment at the city’s hospital.

It said the injured and the bodies of the deceased would be repatriated later on Sunday to Doha.

Earlier, two security sources told Reuters that a car carrying Qatari diplomats overturned on a curve on a road 31 miles from the city.

Wikileaks suggests CIA planned car hacks for assassinations

The CIA was investigating ways to take over your car's on-board computer, forcing it to crash and allowing America's Central Intelligence Agency to carry out "nearly undetectable assassinations," according to a new and damaging Wikileaks document leak.

The incredible claims are included in the more 8,700 documents (codenamed Vault 7) which were today released by Wikileaks, and also include plans to turn home televisions into spy microphones and detail the ability to hack smartphones so they send the CIA the owner's location, phone calls and text communications.

The CIA is yet to confirm the authenticity of the documents, but Wikileaks - founded by Australian Julian Assange, who is currently residing in the Embassy of Ecuador in London, where he has been granted asylum - has a history of leaking hugely damaging and authentic documents.

The leak details a technology dubbed "Weeping Angel", in which CIA operatives "infest" a range of Samsung Smart TVs.

The technology than takes control of the television's microphone, and ensures it stays on when its owner thinks it's switched off, beaming any conversations to the CIA's control centre.

But in alarming news for modern car owners, the leaks also detail a plan to remotely take control of vehicles, which, according to Wikileaks, would allow the CIA to carry out undetectable assassinations.

The documents detail an October 2014 meeting, in which the Embedded Development Branch included cars and trucks in its Weeping Angel program, specifically targeting "vehicle control systems."

"The purpose of such control is not specified, but it would permit the CIA to engage in nearly undetectable assassinations," the Wikileaks Press Release reads.

While the method of controlling vehicles is not specified, it's possible the CIA would target a vehicle's on-board internet connection, essentially hacking the car and taking control of key systems.

A group of US-based hackers used that method to take control of a 2014 Jeep Cherokee, killing the ignition as the car was driving in traffic before disabling the vehicle's brakes.

The hack forced parent company FCA into recalling 1.4 million vehicles.

Australian-delivered Jeeps do not feature the on-board internet connection.

Speaking to Wired magazine, one of the hackers, Chris Valasek, said: "Imagine…if instead of cutting the transmission on the highway, we'd turned the wheel 180 degrees. You'd be dead."

WikiLeaks: CIA Secret Exploits Target Car Hacking, Smart TVs

WikiLeaks has released thousands of documents that it claims show how the Central Intelligence Agency can break into smartphones, computers and other connected devices, including smart TVs.

The trove, which WikiLeaks is dubbing “Vault 7,” purports to be a massive archive of CIA material consisting of several hundred million lines of computer code that has been “circulated among former US government hackers and contractors in an unauthorized manner, one of whom has provided WikiLeaks with portions of the archive.”

“This demonstrates conflicting challenges faced by the security developer community,” said Vikram Kapoor, co-founder and CTO at Lacework, a Mountain View, Calif. based provider of cloud security solutions, via email. “On one hand, this has scary implications for individual privacy rights and shows how extensively some of the systems can be hacked. On the other hand, it demonstrates how hard it is to manage security for insider risk and cloud workloads today for organizations.”

Most centrally, the documents show ways that the agency allegedly can hack mobile phones and can bypass the encryption used by messaging services like Signal, WhatsApp and Telegram. After penetrating Android phones, the CIA can collect “audio and message traffic before encryption is applied,” WikiLeaks said.

He purported intelligence documents also include detailed information on CIA-developed malware—dubbed things like Assassin and Medusa. And, the documents point to an entire alleged unit in the CIA is devoted to hacking Apple products. Further, WikiLeaks alleges that the CIA is proven here to have deliberately failed to disclose security vulnerabilities and bugs to major US software manufacturers, choosing instead to leverage them for their own ends.

On a darker front, the documents claim that the CIA maintains remote hacking programs to turn various connected devices, including smart TVs, into recording and transmitting stations, with the feeds sent back to secret CIA servers.

Other capabilities “would permit the CIA to engage in nearly undetectable assassinations,” WikiLeaks said. One document lays out actions that the CIA allegedly took to infiltrate and take over vehicle control systems in cars and trucks.

“Many of the vulnerabilities cited in this tool set are well-known,” said Andrew McDonnell, president at AsTech, a San Francisco-based security consulting company, via email. “Smart TVs, old Android phones (such as the President's), unpatched routers, and a host of other devices have known vulnerabilities that are not exclusive to the CIA. These implementations may have been exclusive, but that doesn't mean only the CIA had exploits. If genuine, there are likely some proprietary vulnerabilities or zero-days in there. Ultimately, secret backdoors in software—whether intentional or based on an exploit—make everyone less safe: there's no way to control who uses them.”

The source of the documents was not named, no news organization has verified the documents’ authenticity, and the CIA has said that it will not comment. However, a former intelligence officer told the New York Times that some of the code names for CIA programs, an organization chart and the description of a CIA hacking base appeared to be genuine.

Edward Snowden meanwhile has weighed in via Twitter, saying that he too believes the information to be real.

“Program & office names, such as the JQJ (IOC) crypt series, are real. Only a cleared insider could know them,” he tweeted.

The initial release, which WikiLeaks said was only the first part of the document collection, includes 7,818 web pages with 943 attachments. The documents, from the CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence, are dated from 2013 to 2016, and the sum total of the cache is the “entire hacking capacity” for the CIA.

WikiLeaks said it was not releasing any cyberweapon code itself “until a consensus emerges on the technical and political nature of the CIA’s program and how such ‘weapons’ should be analyzed, disarmed and published.”

Fred Wilmot, CEO at Packetsled, told us that the ethics of the situation don’t stand the CIA in good stead, should the documents prove to be legitimate.

"There is nothing to debate about the security, creation and proliferation of cyberweapons,” he said via email. “However, there is plenty to debate about privacy, audit and transparency for Americans when it comes to their homes, their personal data and their required level of cognition necessary to protect themselves from any cyberweapons in today's connected world.”

Evidence for car-hacking capabilities

Cybersecurity research

• Demonstrated hacks: Cybersecurity experts and "white-hat" hackers have repeatedly shown how the electronic systems of modern cars can be remotely compromised. Examples include a 2015 demonstration by researchers Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek who remotely took over a Jeep Cherokee, manipulating its acceleration, brakes, and steering. A 2024 report also revealed a flaw in Kia's web portal that allowed hackers to track and control millions of vehicles.

• Vulnerable systems: Modern vehicles have numerous Electronic Control Units (ECUs) and network connections—such as cellular, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi—that provide potential entry points for hackers. This vulnerability has been publicly acknowledged by agencies like the FBI and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).

Intelligence agency interest

• CIA document leaks: In 2017, WikiLeaks released documents, known as "Vault 7," that detailed CIA hacking tools. Among the leaked files were documents mentioning the agency's interest in "Vehicle Systems" and QNX, an operating system used in many car infotainment systems.

• No confirmation of use: While these documents confirmed the CIA's interest in vehicle hacking, they did not prove that such capabilities were ever developed or used for lethal purposes. A CIA spokesperson declined to confirm the authenticity of the leaks.

The origins of the assassination theory

The idea that intelligence agencies used car-hacking for assassinations gained traction following the 2013 death of journalist Michael Hastings, whose car crashed under suspicious circumstances.

• A former U.S. counter-terrorism coordinator suggested that a cyberattack was consistent with the publicly available evidence.

• However, the crash was officially ruled an accident, and there is no evidence connecting it to the CIA or a remote hack.

Why Mossad is included

The claim about Mossad likely comes from news reports about Israeli cybersecurity firms, not from leaked intelligence documents or demonstrated hacks.

• In 2015, an Israeli firm called Argus developed technology to protect cars from remote hacking, which led to news articles about Israeli companies being at the forefront of car cybersecurity.

• Reports also indicate that the Israeli military has considered banning high-tech cars from its bases due to security concerns.

• Speculation has expanded from these reports, inaccurately suggesting that Mossad possesses such offensive capabilities.

Conclusion

While remote vehicle hacking is a proven cybersecurity threat, the claim that the CIA and Mossad have a capability to remotely and routinely cause fatal crashes is unproven and speculative.

The theory combines legitimate public research on car vulnerabilities with leaked documents showing the CIA's interest in vehicle systems, but it lacks any confirmed instances of these agencies using such a method for assassinations.

NYT Oct. 12, 2025 - Three Qatari officials have been killed in a car crash in Egypt as the country prepared to host a Gaza peace summit led by President Trump and President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt.

The men died in a “painful traffic accident” in the Red Sea resort city of Sharm el-Sheikh, Qatar’s embassy in Cairo said in a statement early Sunday morning, without specifying when the crash occurred.

The three were staff members in the Qatari royal court and died “while performing their work,” the embassy said.

Qatar has been a key mediator in efforts to broker a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, the militant group in Gaza. Last week, negotiations in Sharm el-Sheikh led to a breakthrough, with the two sides agreeing to the first phase of Mr. Trump’s peace proposal to end the two-year-old war in Gaza.

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On Monday, a summit in support of Mr. Trump’s peace proposal is to be held in Sharm el-Sheikh. Mr. Trump and Mr. el-Sisi will preside over the gathering, according to a statement from the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Other world leaders also are expected to attend, including President Emmanuel Macron of France and Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain.

It named the men as Saud bin Thamer Al Thani, a member of Qatar’s royal family; Abdullah Ghanem al-Khiyarain; and Hassan Jaber al-Jaber. Two other men were injured, the embassy added.