Enlarge image
Demonstration for Catalan independence in October 2019
Photo: Quique Garcia/EPA-EFE/REX
Spain's authorities are said to have spied on the mobile phones of dozens of leaders of the Catalan separatist movement using Pegasus software.
"We have all been spied on in a huge and illegal way using software that only states can own," former Catalan regional president Carles Puigdemont wrote on Twitter on Monday.
"Politicians, lawyers and activists are all victims of Spain's dirty war," said Puigdemont.
According to a report by the Toronto-based research group Citizen Lab, quoted by the US magazine The New Yorker and the Spanish newspaper El País, the mobile phones of at least 65 Catalan separatists are said to have been infiltrated with Pegasus.
The phones are said to have been hacked between 2017 and 2020 using spy software developed in Israel.
This type of espionage is illegal in Spain.
Today's President of Catalonia apparently spied on
According to Citizen Lab, the current Catalan regional president Pere Aragonès, the former regional presidents Quim Torra and Artur Mas, members of the Catalan Parliament and the European Parliament and representatives of Catalan civil society are said to have been spied on using Pegasus.
According to Citizen Lab, Puigdemont was not the target of the Pegasus attacks, but several people around him, including his wife.
Puigdemont went into exile in Belgium after the failed attempt to secede from Spain in 2017 to avoid prosecution in Spain.
Press conferences by Puigdemont and EU parliamentarians on the espionage allegations are planned for Tuesday in Brussels.
The Spanish government initially did not comment on these allegations.
Controversial spy software
The Pegasus software from the Israeli manufacturer NSO is able to read out all data from mobile phones attacked with it.
In addition, Pegasus can switch on the camera and microphone of the respective device unnoticed.
NSO was confronted last year with allegations from a network of 17 international media that the software had been used to spy on journalists, politicians, heads of state, activists and company bosses in numerous countries.
col/AFP