Aragones appears before the judge (CNI) on charges of spying on his phone

The state president, Pere Aragones, yesterday directly before the judge pointed to the Center for National Intelligence (CNI) as the organization that spied on him via his mobile phone using the Pegasus program, according to judicial sources consulted by this newspaper.

The Catalan president explained in his testimony before the judge, which lasted about 45 minutes, that the period in which his phone was intercepted, between July 2018 and March 2020, coincided with the formation of the Quem Torra government (the intervention occurred a month after that). Constitution of the Catalan Executive), the first censure application submitted by Pedro Sanchez Against Mariano Rajoy, budgets and the dialogue table. In all these negotiations he obtained the maximum representation for his party in the government and also as leader of the ERC, since the imprisonment of Oriol Junqueras.

Yesterday, Aragones appeared before the judge investigating the open case after a complaint he made about his phone being spied on was confirmed by an expert report submitted by Citizen Lab. The state president certified the complaint in court and answered the judge’s questions, as well as those of the Public Prosecutor’s Office and his lawyer, Andrew van den Eynde. The Public Prosecution did not attend the interrogation, although it represents the former director of the Office of National Intelligence, Paz Esteban, who is the only defendant in the case so far.

Infected via SMS

The ERC leader’s private phone, where he stores not only information on matters of political importance, but also personal data and photos, was infected with Pegasus via mobile phone messages. It is not known what information he was able to steal, because, according to sources familiar with the judicial process, the president did not realize that his phone had been tapped. In addition, according to the same sources, one of the periods in which he was spied on corresponds to the beginning of the Covid pandemic, when the use of mobile phones became more common.

At the end of his testimony in Barcelona’s City of Justice, Aragonés told the media that it was a “moral and ethical obligation” to declassify all documents so that “the whole truth about the espionage” would be known to about 60 people. People are wired for independence. The president stressed that one of the goals, in addition to clarifying the truth about this type of operation, is to prevent spying on any citizen in Catalonia “because of his ideology,” which he described as “illegal interference.” He also noted that by using Pegasus, his privacy had been attacked, as he saves personal photos on his mobile phone, and urged “all measures” to be taken so that actions of this kind do not occur in the future, which he described as “extremely dangerous.” He repeated: “The goal is to know the whole truth and clarify who ordered it and how the stolen data was used.”

Barcelona judge Santiago García García, of Barcelona’s 29th Investigative Court, also cited the former CNI director as being under investigation yesterday. But at the request of his defense, implemented by the State Public Prosecution, the appearance was postponed. Esteban claimed that he was unable to access all the case documents, and asked for more time from the investigating judge, who agreed to postpone the former intelligence chief’s statements until next January. There was a possibility that Esteban would not answer certain questions precisely because the documents had not been declassified, although at the same time the State Attorney’s Office appealed the judge’s request to declassify these texts.

Aragones filed a lawsuit against the former director of CNI and the Israeli company NSO, which owns the Pegasus electronic spying system, in June 2022, although the court was initially restricted to the National Court, at the request of the Public Prosecution, considering this court to be the one competent to decide on the matter. The President of Catalonia is the highest authority in the state. This decision was overturned last June by the Barcelona Court, and Judge Santiago Garcia Garcia eventually took over the case.

At a preliminary hearing in mid-October, the judge agreed to accept the complaint and asked the DNI and the Delegated Committee for State Intelligence, based in Moncloa, if the intelligence service of “any other Spanish government body” obtained or used such information. The program, which people intervened to obtain and forward any record of events, events or data related to the Aragones phone number. He also asked the Audit Bureau and the State Comptroller General to send him a certificate about whether CNI had purchased the software from the Israeli company NSO or other companies and at what cost.