An explosive new report claims that Washington Post owner and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was hacked after opening a message on WhatsApp from Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Bezos, the world’s richest man, was “hacked” in 2018 and his private sexual messages, with a woman who was not his wife, were sent to the National Enquirer.

The report from the Guardian claims that a digital forensic analysis found that a message sent to Bezos from a number used by Mohammed bin Salman is believed to have included a malicious file that infiltrated the phone.

“This analysis found it ‘highly probable’ that the intrusion into the phone was triggered by an infected video file sent from the account of the Saudi heir to Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post,” the Guardian report states. “The two men had been having a seemingly friendly WhatsApp exchange when, on 1 May of that year, the unsolicited file was sent, according to sources who spoke to the Guardian on the condition of anonymity.”

TRENDING: Obama Statement on Ginsburg Demands GOP Senate Honors Her Dying 'Instructions' and Put Off Vote on Supreme Court Nominee Until New President Sworn In

According to their source, large amounts of data were pulled from the phone “within hours” after he was sent the file.

“The disclosure is likely to raise difficult questions for the kingdom about the circumstances around how US tabloid the National Enquirer came to publish intimate details about Bezos’s private life – including text messages – nine months later,” the Guardian noted. “It may also lead to renewed scrutiny about what the crown prince and his inner circle were doing in the months prior to the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post journalist who was killed in October 2018 – five months after the alleged “hack” of the newspaper’s owner.”

The crown prince reportedly has a relationship with David Pecker, who, at the time, was the chief executive of the company that owned the Enquirer.

The Saudi Arabian government has previously denied being involved in the hack.