Syrian opposition got hold of thousands of e-mails from the personal accounts of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his wife Asma al-Assad. The emails showing that Asad does not care at all regarding recent unrest in the country in which more then 8,000 people have died since.
Asad’s personal email account was hacked by Anonymous hackers few hours ago and The Guardian then acquired over 3,000 documents from hacked email that according to opposition is the personal email of ruling couple Bashar and Asma al-Assad [email protected] and [email protected].
According to Guardian, opposition had access to the couple’s emails addresses in June 2011 due to an inside source, with strong connection with the government and with the opposition/activists “Supreme Council of the Revolution” provided them with the emails and passwords for both accounts but the access to the emails was disconnected last month.
Then it was Anonymous hacking group which hacked into Syrian Government server and hacked many emails including the ruling couple’s emails. On February 7, 2012, Bashar Ul Asad received an email in which the sender had threaten him and that was when both emails were shutdown by the government.
However it was too late to shutdown the accounts as almost each and every data was downloaded by the hackers and send to Guardian few days ago. While Bashar al-Assad claims leaked emails are a hoax.
According to report by Arstechnica, Within the e-mails, Assad occasionally makes light of reforms he promised in order to control the civil crises breaking out in Syria, at one point referencing “rubbish laws of parties, elections, media…” in an e-mail with his wife, and another time forwarding a YouTube video of a parody re-enactment of the siege of Homs with toy cars and cookies to his media adviser with the response, “Hahahahahahaha, OMG!!! This is amazing!”
As Syrians were struggling with hunger and political turmoil, the president and his wife also spent more than $15,000 on a chandelier, candlesticks, and a table from Paris. And, according to The Guardian, Assad got around US sanctions to purchase Apple products—using a third party with a US address, Assad made personal purchases of music and apps from the iTunes store.
More surprisingly, the e-mails reveal that a senior aide to Asma Assad appealed to Twitter to remove at least 11 “fraudulent” Twitter accounts. The social media company conceded, removing “half of the accounts using the first lady’s name and all but one of those using the president’s name,” according to The Guardian. Twitter claimed it would suspend accounts that were blatant attempts at impersonation, but would allow parody accounts. One of the accounts was called @Syrianpresident, and claimed it had 2,500 followers and openly identified itself as a parody account. While the account is obviously no longer available on Twitter, Favstar.fm, a “Best of Twitter” curation site, shows @SyrianPresident’s former profile as “Parody account of #Syria president #Bashar al-#Assad. I am not really the president of #Syria, but you wish I were.”
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