Arancha González Laya (in a blue jacket, in the center of the image), in Rabat during an official visit to Morocco in January 2020. JALAL MORCHIDI (EFE)
The mobile phones of the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, and the Minister of Defense, Margarita Robles, were not the only ones spied on in May 2021. On those same dates, when the diplomatic crisis between Spain and Morocco was at its peak , the telephone number of the then Minister of Foreign Affairs, Arancha González Laya, was also attacked, according to government sources.
The then head of Spanish diplomacy was notified by the secret services that her phone had been attacked, González Laya handed over her terminal and the technicians of the National Intelligence Center (CNI) confirmed the intrusion, but they did not determine the
malware
used or the perpetrator of the attack, according to the sources consulted.
There is no evidence that a judicial complaint was filed then, as has been done now.
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Between May 17 and 19 of last year, Morocco instigated the irregular entry into Ceuta of more than 10,000 immigrants, many minors, used as an instrument of pressure on the Spanish government after it had welcomed the secretary general of the Front Polisario, Brahim Gali, sick with covid.
González Laya negotiated the entry into Spain of the Saharawi leader, while Robles was in charge of mobilizing the Army to stop the avalanche of irregular immigrants.
Morocco is one of the clients of the Israeli company NSO.
According to research by the Forbidden Stories consortium and Amnesty International, he has used the Pegasus program to spy on dozens of human rights defenders, journalists and activists;
and he has had the French president himself, Emmanuel Macron, and several of his ministers in his sights.
04:59
How does Pegasus work?
Moroccan espionage is very active in Spain.
The CNI has submitted reports to the Government in which it assures that several processes opened in Spanish courts against those responsible for the Polisario Front for alleged cases of torture have been directed and financed by the Moroccan Administration, in an attempt to damage its image in the eyes of Spanish public opinion. .
Morocco's public relations campaign has also included, according to the same sources, media favorable to Rabat's position on the Western Sahara conflict.
The cyberattack in May of last year was not the first suffered by González Laya.
In August 2020, the mobile phones of the Minister of Foreign Affairs and the then Minister of Justice, Juan Carlos Campo, were already subject to intrusions.
Although its authorship was not clarified, suspicions were directed at that time towards sectors close to the former president of the Generalitat Carles Puigdemont, who in recent years have cultivated a close relationship with Israel.
If the pro-independence authorship is repeated now, which the Government does not rule out, the paradox would be that some of the
hackers would have been
hacked
themselves
.
The investigation opened by the National Court, after the complaint filed by the State Attorney, will try to clarify who was the ultimate recipient of the more than 2.6 gigabytes of information stolen from the president and the Defense Minister.
It will not be easy, the technicians warn, because, as in money laundering, multiple intermediate scales are used to make traceability difficult and cause the thief to lose track.
In the event that Rabat's authorship is confirmed, the Government would also have an added problem: to take diplomatic retaliation against a country with which it has just reconciled at a high political price, the change of position on the Sahara.
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