WASHINGTON: The US Department of Justice has skited it has retrieved information from a pair of iPhones linked to alleged terrorist without the assistance of Apple.

The FBI claims it has broken into two locked iPhones owned by Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani, who last December allegedly killed three people in a shooting in Florida. 

They asked Apple to provide a back door into the iPhone, but the company refused, which resulted in a long running court case.

The spooks have now confirmed that they got the information off the encrypted iOS phones using a break-in tool.

Analysts say they probably used widgets developed by Israeli company Cellebrite or Gray Key widget, a US based software company. The widgets exploit weaknesses in Apple’s firmware or use brute force to access the log-in user interface.