The Mossos have confirmed that the mobile phone of the former president of the Catalan National Assembly (ANC) and former leader of Junts Jordi Sanchez He was attacked up to 19 times with Pegasus between 2015 and 2020, coinciding on some occasions with a prison leave that he enjoyed while participating in the creation of his party, according to legal sources.
Sànchez and his successor in office, Elisenda Paluzie, as well as Sonia Urpí, former member of the ANC secretariat, testified this Tuesday before the Barcelona judge investigating the complaint they filed for spying on their mobile phones with Pegasusa software that the Israeli company NSO markets in principle only to States.
The judge has questioned the three complainants about their personal circumstances and the political context during which their cell phones were attacked with Pegasus, after the analysis that she commissioned from the Mossos on their cell phones has corroborated that they were spied on with the software maliciouslegal sources have reported.
In fact, the former director of the CNI Paz Esteban, who is still being investigated for spying on the former Catalan president’s cell phone Pere Aragonesalready acknowledged in his appearance in Congress that the ANC leaders Sànchez and Paluzie were among the twenty political officials linked to the independence movement whose mobile phones were attacked by Pegasus, although he insisted that they always had the mandatory endorsement of the Supreme Court.
The report of the Mossos d’Esquadra corroborates the evidence detected in the analysis prepared by the Toronto laboratory Citizen Lab, which was the one that uncovered the massive espionage of the independence movement with Pegasus, and later ratified by another expert report carried out by Amnesty International.
As detailed by Jordi Sànchez, the reports from Citizen Lab and Amnesty (which analyzed two mobile phones that the former president of the ANC used successively) found evidence of 26 attacks, while the Mossos, who have inspected only one of his phones, have detected until 19.
Most of the intrusions on Sànchez’s cell phone took place between September 2015 and October 13, 2017 (two days before he entered preventive detention for the processes), that is, at the stage in which he presided over the Catalan National Assembly and, therefore, before it was the subject of judicial investigation by 1-O.
The expert evidence has determined that information was extracted from Jordi Sànchez’s cell phone through Pegasus, although it has not been possible to specify what data was stolen from his phone.
The former leader of processes places the espionage in three key moments: the days prior to the Diada mobilizations and the unilateral referendum of 1-O and the stage in which the founding of Junts was taking shape, a party of which he was appointed general secretary in August 2020.
As warned Elisenda Paluziethat 2015 intrusion (when the CNI Félix Sanz Roldán was in charge) is not among those recognized by the former director of the CNI in her appearance in Congress, so it is necessary to find out who ordered it and if this attack had legal coverage .
In the case of the former president of the ANC, the Mossos computer expert points to four attacks with Pegasus: two of them in August and October 2019 (before and after the sentencing of the processes) and another two between May and June 2020, when, in the middle of the pandemic, the pro-independence entity was engaged in electronic voting to renew its secretariat.
On some occasions, the intrusions on Paluzie’s mobile phone were carried out through an SMS that infected the phone when it was opened (in his case, it was the link of a news story about ANC elections), while others were carried out using a “zero-click attack vector”, which does not even require opening the malicious message.
According to the complainants, the former director of the CNI also did not recognize the attack on the cell phone of Sònia Urpíwho suffered two infections in June 2020, when she was elected secretary of the entity but had not yet been named mobilization coordinator.
Within the framework of the investigation, the investigating judge has processed letters rogatory to Israel and Luxembourg, where NSO have domiciled companies, so that they detail who they have sold the software and at what price and clarify if they keep information on the infections and the data extracted from Jordi Sànchez.
The former president of the ANC has demanded that “Justice act and get to the bottom of it to clarify who authorized the espionage and with what arguments can the proportionality of having the mobile phone infected between the years 2015 and 2020 be justified?
“It is a persecution against certain ideas and people for defending a certain political project,” added Sànchez, who promises to continue with his complaint “until the last breath” in the ordinary courts and, if necessary, the European ones.
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