“We are absolutely certain that this is an external attack”. The cell phones of Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and his Defense Minister Margarita Robles were tapped “illegally” using Israeli software Pegasus, the Spanish government said on Monday.
“It is not a question of suppositions”, declared during a press conference convened with urgency the Minister of the Presidency, Félix Bolaños, who spoke of facts of “enormous gravity” which were produced in 2021. “We are absolutely certain that this is an external attack (…) because in Spain, in a democracy like ours, all interventions are carried out by official bodies and with a judicial authorization,” he said.
“Two Intrusions”
“In the present case, neither of these two circumstances occurred”, continued Félix Bolaños. “That is why (…) we have no doubt that this is an external intervention”. He did not specify if the Spanish authorities had a track on the origin of this intervention, and in particular if it came from a foreign country.
“When we speak of external intrusion, what we mean is that it is not the work of state bodies and that it has not been authorized by justice,” explained the minister. Félix Bolaños also indicated that there were “two intrusions” into the Prime Minister’s cell phone in May 2021 and one into Margarita Robles’ in June 2021.
In both cases, the interventions made it possible to extract “a determined volume of data from the two mobile phones”, he further declared. The government filed a complaint for these facts on Monday with the National Audience, a court responsible for cases of national or international importance.
Designed by the Israeli company NSO, Pegasus allows, once installed on a laptop, to access messaging, data or to activate the device remotely for the purpose of capturing sound or images. NSO has always maintained that Pegasus can only be sold to states.
According to the daily El País, the hackers extracted 2.6 gigabytes of data from Pedro Sanchez’s phone and nine megabytes from that of Margarita Robles, but the government still does not know “the nature of the stolen information and its degree of sensitivity”. These are their official telephones, made available to them by the State, and not private.
These revelations come as Spain is in the throes of a crisis between the central government of Pedro Sánchez, a socialist, and pro-independence circles in Catalonia who accuse the National Intelligence Center (CNI, the Spanish intelligence services) of espionage .