The mobile phones of the Spanish Prime Minister, Pedro Sanchezand his defense minister, Margaret Oakswere subject to “illegal” and “external” wiretapping through the Israeli Pegasus computer program, the Spanish government said on Monday.
“They are not assumptions,” declared, during an urgently called press conference, the Minister of the Presidency, Félix Bolaños, who spoke of “events of enormous gravity” that occurred in 2021.
“We are absolutely certain that it is an external attack (…) because in Spain, in a democracy like ours, all interventions are carried out by official bodies and with judicial authorization,” Bolaños said.
“In this case, neither of the two circumstances has occurred,” he added. “That is why we are certain, we have no doubt that it is an infection, it is an intervention that is external,” the minister stressed.
Bolaños did not specify, however, whether the Spanish authorities have any indication of who may be behind this intervention or whether they are thinking of a foreign country.
When we talk about it being an external intrusion, what we mean is that it is alien to state agencies and that it does not have judicial authorization,” the minister explained.
Bolaños indicated that “two intrusions” had been detected in Sánchez’s cell phone in May 2021 and one in Robles’s, in June 2021.
In both cases, the interventions allowed extracting “a certain volume of data of both mobile phones,” he added without specifying the amount.
“There is no evidence that any intrusion has occurred after these dates,” he added later, however, when asked about the duration of the infections.
Conceived by the Israeli company NSOPegasus allows access to messaging services and data as soon as it is installed on a cell phone, in addition to activating the device remotely to be able to capture images or sound.
NSO has always stated that it only sells Pegasus to states and that these operations must first be approved by the Israeli authorities.
According to the NGO International Amnestythis software could have been used to hack up to 50,000 mobile phones in the world.
These latest revelations come in the midst of political turmoil in Spain, where the central government of the socialist Sánchez has been in tension for days with the Catalan independentists, who accuse the National Intelligence Center (CNI) of having spied on them.
The case exploded on April 18, when Citizen Laba cybersecurity project of the University of Toronto, published a report that identified more than 60 people from the Catalan pro-independence orbit who would have had their mobile phones infected between 2017 and 2020 with the Israeli Pegasus espionage software.