Colombia’s police are investigating the death of an Israeli citizen whose LinkedIn claims he worked for Sandvine, a Canadian company that has been accused of enabling dictatorships.
The death of alleged Sandvine sales engineer Yariv Bokor came days after President Gustavo Petro announced that Sandvine’s former sister company in Israel, NSO Group, sold spyware to Colombia’s Police Intelligence Directorate (DIPOL).
Colombia’s police intelligence purchased Israeli spyware in secret: Petro
Bokor’s body was found in one of three apartments he owned in Poblado, an affluent neighborhood in the south of Medellin.
According to newspaper El Tiempo, police found broken glass and blood stains in the bathroom where the body of the Israeli was found.
Some of the neighbors had reportedly heard shouting in Bokor’s apartment on Monday last week, after which the Israeli allegedly stopped answering calls from acquaintances.
According to news website Cambio, Bokor registered an ICT company at the Medellin Chamber of Commerce of 2013 and closed the company only months later.
In 2016, the Israeli began working for Sandvine in Medellin where the Canadian company does not have formally registered companies.
The United States government barred US companies from providing technology to Sandvine in February after multiple report of the company’s enabling of authoritarian regimes’ digital censorship and harassment practices in more than a dozen countries around the world.
Sandvine supplies deep packet inspection tools, which have been used in mass web-monitoring and censorship to block news as well as in targeting political actors and human rights activists. This technology has been misused to inject commercial spyware into the devices of perceived critics and dissidents.
State Department
Between 2017 and 2019, both Sandvine and NSO Group, which created the Pegasus software, were controlled by the same parent company, Francisco Partners LLC from the United States.
NSO Group had been blacklisted by the US Government since 2021 for its involvement in the spying on human rights defenders and journalists.
The Colombian Prosecutor General’s Office began investigating the Israeli firm’s alleged sale of the spyware Pegasus to Colombian police intelligence only days before Bokor’s death.