When the illegal siege of Qatar started off exactly a year ago, it was on the back of false news items that were planted in the Qatar News Agency (QNA) after the website was hacked.

The breach of QNA and the publication of fabricated statements attributed to HH The Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani can be attributed to a Saudi piracy cell, according to an investigation carried out by Al Jazeera.

According to the investigation, which was broadcast last Sunday, the piracy cell worked from within a leading Saudi ministry in the capital — Riyadh, reported The Peninsula.

The hacking of QNA and government social media accounts on May 24, 2017, set into motion a major diplomatic crisis in the region.

A fictitious Emirati company based in Azerbaijan asked three Turkish companies, which work on securing online platforms and websites, to detect security breaches in a list of online news websites including QNA. They offered to provide solutions to protect these websites against the security breaches.

According to the investigation, the UAE-owned company ended its operation in Azerbaijan as soon as the data became available to it. The information was then handed over to the Saudi hacking team.

In the meantime, Qatar Institute of Computerisation revealed that Saudi Arabia and its allies created about 187 new Twitter accounts during or before the day of the onset of the crisis.

United States and European officials said, at the time of the incident, that while US government agencies and experts were convinced that QNA and the Qatari government's Twitter feed were hacked, they had not determined who was behind it.