The Government’s defense thesis in relation to the espionage of the National Intelligence Center (CNI) on the independentists runs the risk of being denied. The judge investigating the espionage of the president of the Generalitat through the Pegasus program suspects that the CNI was able to infiltrate the ERC leader’s cell phone without asking permission from the Supreme Court, as required by law.
According to legal sources informing elDiario.es, the need to investigate further and corroborate whether the CNI spied on Aragonès without approval from the Supreme Court has caused Judge Santiago García to extend the investigation of the case and reject the last request to archive the former director’s case. of the CNI Paz Esteban, the only government official accused of espionage.
The investigating judge has two opposing theses on the table: Esteban’s defense, who exercises the State Attorney’s Office – dependent on the Government – maintains that there is no crime since the espionage on Aragonès was authorized by the Supreme Court.
On the other hand, Aragonès maintains that, although it has the endorsement of the Supreme Court, the CNI’s espionage – recognized by the center itself in parliament – is illegal as it is based on political motivations, something that is prohibited by law. The center’s excuse for asking to intervene in all of Aragonès’s communications was that he was an alleged leader of the Committees for the Defense of the Republic (CDR), a role that the independence leader never played.
Furthermore, now Aragonès, who is represented by criminal lawyer Andreu Van den Eynde, has found a new asset to put Paz Esteban on the bench: through an expert report, the president’s defense has detected that his mobile phone was even spied on before the period – July 2019 to March 2020 – that was authorized by the Supreme Court judge in charge of endorsing the CNI’s requests to violate fundamental rights.
Specifically, according to the expert analysis of a private laboratory commissioned by Aragonès, one of the infiltrations of the Pegasus program into the ERC leader’s mobile phone occurred in July 2018, that is, one year before the attacks authorized by the Supreme Court. .
The hypothesis that the CNI would also be behind this espionage without judicial permission is that the SMS through which the first espionage of the year 2018 was carried out – Aragonès opened a malicious link included in the message that contained the Pegasus program – is linked to a server identical to the one on which the president’s mobile data obtained through espionage endorsed by the Supreme Court ended up a year later.
To corroborate the thesis of the expert report provided by Aragonès, the judge will foreseeably require an expert opinion from the Mossos d’Esquadra as an impartial Judicial Police on the president’s motive, as other judges who investigate the infiltrations with Pegasus in the devices have done. of other independence leaders.
In their report last January, Mossos computer experts concluded that the mobile terminals of ERC leaders Diana Riba and Josep Maria Jové were infected by a malicious program that Pegasus. Due to the magnitude of the attack, Catalan police computer scientists could not rule out that the spyware had been active in the days after the infections, which occurred in 2019 and 2020.
In short, the expert report will be the proof of cotton in a case that faces its final stretch of the investigation after an unprecedented but incomplete declassification by the Government of the Supreme Court rulings that, at the request of the CNI, authorized the use of Pegasus on Aragonès’s cell phone.
The instructor wanted to know if the CNI has a license to use the program, if it was the center or another organization that purchased it from the Israeli company NSO Group and which “specific people” from the organization and the firm participated in the sale.
It also requested the center to provide the documents related to the order, purchase, installation, payment, training and support for the use of Pegasus, as well as for the CNI to send the records of use of the spy program on Aragonès’s mobile phone. But the Government refused to provide the magistrate with all this information since, as the Executive argued, “it would mean generating a serious, certain and current risk and threat to the life and integrity of the CNI’s sources and collaborators.”
Source: www.eldiario.es
