The President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, in an act this Wednesday. EMILIO NARANJO (EFE)
Judge José Luis Calama, who is investigating the alleged infection of the cell phones of members of the Government with the Pegasus
spyware
, has ordered the National Intelligence Center (CNI) to keep and make available the dump he made of the president's cell phones of the Executive, Pedro Sánchez, and three of his ministers: Margarita Robles, Fernando Grande-Marlaska and Luis Planas, Ministers of Defense, Interior and Agriculture, respectively.
The magistrate emphasizes that, when the State Attorney denounced the events, it was based on two reports prepared after analyzing the telephone numbers of those affected.
“That is why the need arises to retain and preserve the effects or instruments related to the crime instructed in this case,” Calama points out in a resolution issued this Wednesday, where he adds: “It is appropriate to agree on the conservation, at the disposal of this body court, of all the information dumps verified on the referenced telephone terminals, as well as any information that may have been extracted from them, and of all kinds of reports, whether preliminary, final, or of any other type, prepared for that purpose " .
The judge considers that the material obtained from the mobiles may constitute key evidence to advance the investigations.
The
Pegasus case
began in May, when Calama received a complaint from the State Attorney for the intrusion of the
Israeli spyware into Sánchez and Robles' cell phones
.
The investigations were later expanded after detecting more alleged attacks against the Grande-Marlaska and Planas devices.
The case is partially secret and the judge has summoned the Minister of the Presidency, Félix Bolaños, to declare that he has decided to respond in writing to the instructor's questions – an option that members of the Government can take advantage of.
In another resolution issued this week, the judge already stated that the alleged theft of data from government mobile phones is not only a matter that affects their privacy and opened the hypothesis that information that affects national security had been stolen, since that the Minister of Defense is one of those affected.
Before, the magistrate had already indicated that, as a result of the investigations, "sensitive information, which may be legally classified" and that could "seriously compromise the security of the State" could be handled in the case.
The Government denounced this intrusion into the telephones of Sánchez and his ministers when he was facing a huge political storm.
Citizen Lab, a group of analysts linked to the University of Toronto (Canada), had denounced that 63 people related to the independence movement were allegedly attacked with Pegasus.
The then director of the CNI, Paz Esteban, had to give explanations in Congress.
Later, it was terminated.
Sánchez assured that her departure responded to "a serious failure in the security of the Government's communications" and that, therefore, it was not due to espionage on the secessionists.