Allows the former head of Spanish Intelligence and members of the National Cryptologic Center to testify if necessary

MADRID, 24 May. (EUROPA PRESS) –

The Government has authorized the National Intelligence Center (CNI) to collaborate with the judge of the National High Court José Luis Calama in the investigation that he is secretly carrying out into the espionage that the President of the Executive, Pedro Sánchez, would have suffered with Pegasus , and the Ministers of Defense, Margarita Robles, and the Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, through their mobile phones.

The head of the Central Court of Instruction Number 4 asked the Government to authorize the former director of the CNI Paz Esteban and the authors of the reports from the National Cryptologic Center that accredited espionage on Sánchez and these ministers to testify in the event that the magistrate considered it appropriate, something to which Moncloa has given the go-ahead, according to the government sources consulted by Europa Press.

The same sources emphasize that it is actually a mere formality as part of the judicial investigation, while pointing out that, aside from these possible statements, there is no more relevant information for this case that has to be declassified.

Calama opened preliminary proceedings on April 26, pointing to possible crimes of discovery and disclosure of secrets, after the complaint filed by the State Attorney for the infection of the mobile phones of the President of the Government and the Minister of Defense, a complaint that was later expanded after also confirming the infection of Grande-Marlaska’s phone with this spy software.

In that resolution, the instructor provided details on the initial complaint filed by the State Attorney, according to which, after the analysis of the mobile devices of the Chief Executive and the Minister of Defense carried out by the CERT on April 30 , “it has been known that they were the object of several infections by the Pegasus tool, mobile device spy ‘software’, between the months of May and June 2021”.

The reports of the National Cryptologic Center on the cell phones of Sánchez and Robles highlighted that “the mobile device of the President of the Government analyzed was infected by Pegasus on two occasions (on May 19, 2021 and May 31, 2021)”, while Robles would have been infected in June of that year.

In both cases, Calama collected, the reports stated that “information exfiltration occurred”, but currently neither of the two phones present “known indicators of ongoing Pegasus infection”.

The first of the intrusions in Sánchez’s mobile would have occurred in the context of the massive entry of some 10,000 immigrants into Ceuta between May 17 and 18, which precisely led Sánchez to visit the autonomous city on this second day, as well as Melilla with the Minister of the Interior.

In addition, on May 18 it was when Morocco called its ambassador in Madrid, Karima Benyaicha, for consultations, the one who had been summoned in Foreign Affairs to protest the events in Ceuta. On the same day, the 19th, Sánchez was in a session to control the Government in the Congress of Deputies.

The second would have taken place when the President of the Government was with the Prime Minister of Poland, Mateusz Morawiecki, in Alcalá de Henares on the occasion of the XIII Spanish-Polish Summit. That day, Morocco published a statement in which it indicated that the diplomatic crisis was motivated by the government’s position regarding the Sahara, not by the reception of the leader of the Polisario Front, Brahim Ghali.

Precisely, the latter declared on June 1 as accused before Judge Santiago Pedraz in the National High Court for the complaint filed by the Saharawi Association for the Defense of Human Rights (ASADEH) for genocide and hours later he flew back to Algeria.

As for the mobile phone of the Minister of the Interior, the Government reported after Grande-Marlaska suffered two attacks in the same June 2021. In the first of them 4 megabytes were stolen and in the second a much larger volume of information , 6.3 gigabytes.

The analysis of the terminals of other members of the Government was also able to determine an attempt to infect the phone of the head of Agriculture, Luis Planas, which was unsuccessful, and also occurred in June of last year.