Leaked documents reveal that the United Arab Emirates paid a Geneva-based intelligence firm €55,000 ($61,600) to compile a database of more than 11,300 Facebook users living in the country in order to identify individuals considered “potentially hostile” to the government.

Investigative news outlet Drop Site News carried the report on Friday, identifying the firm in question as Alp Services, and revealing that the project, codenamed “Arnica 2,” collected personal information, including names, residential locations, employment details, and alleged political associations.

Inclusion in the database was based partly on users liking Facebook pages operated by news outlets and political groups critical of Emirati policies.

The operation began in 2017, amid heightened tensions between the UAE and Qatar and increasing restrictions on political expression. In June that year, the UAE’s general prosecutor warned that expressing sympathy for Qatar or opposing measures against it could carry a prison sentence of up to 15 years.

Alp subsequently proposed using its “proprietary tools and advanced mapping software” to identify people who publicly liked pages associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, the oldest and most popular political party in Egypt, which Emirati authorities regard as a “threat.”

In a July 2017 report, the company claimed to have identified approximately 1,000 Brotherhood “supporters” in the UAE, including teachers, students, and employees of the police forces.

The database also included ordinary residents whose recorded connections to the investigation consisted of liking particular pages or joining Facebook groups. The targeted pages included Arabic-language outlets such as Arabi21, Rassd, and al-Araby al-Jadeed.

Alp outsourced part of the data collection to Romanian firm Total Trust Investigations, requesting spreadsheets containing users’ names and profile information.

Internal records show that Alp billed the €55,000 to Abu Dhabi-based so-called ARIAF Studies and Research LLC in December 2017 and delivered the data on a USB drive the following month.

The archive also contained a profile of Emirati human rights activist Ahmed Mansoor, who had been arrested in March 2017 and sentenced to 10 years in prison in 2018 over social media posts calling for political reform.

Approached by Drop Site News, Andreas Krieg of King’s College London warned that the database could have serious implications if it reached Emirati security agencies.

“A database containing people’s names, workplaces, residences, and alleged political associations would be extremely valuable to that apparatus,” he said.