The former head of the Spanish intelligence services was indicted for spying on the Catalan independence regional president, Pere Aragonès, using Pegasus software, Spanish justice announced Monday, October 16. Paz Esteban, who paid the bill for this scandal by being dismissed last year by the government of Pedro Sanchez, was summoned by the Barcelona judge in charge of the case on December 13.
In a judicial document, the magistrate, who admitted Mr. Aragonès’ complaint, affirms that the facts denounced by the moderate separatist have the ” features “ of “possible criminal offenses such as illegal listening to communications and computer espionage”.
“The admission of the complaint (…) is an important step towards establishing the whole truth”, greeted Mr. Aragonès in a message published on X, formerly Twitter. “We want to know who ordered the spying on the independence movement”added the Catalan regional president, who had filed a complaint last year against Mme Esteban and against NSO, the Israeli company that designed Pegasus.
This espionage scandal broke out in April 2022, after the publication of a report by the Canadian organization Citizen Lab claiming to have identified more than 60 people from the Catalan separatist movement whose cell phones were allegedly hacked using this software, which allows you to remotely activate the cameras and microphones of a smartphone. The Spanish government admitted to having spied on 18, including Mr. Aragonès.
A whole new scale
The affair then took on a whole new dimension with the government’s announcement that Mr. Sanchez and two of his ministers had themselves been spied on in 2021 using Pegasus.
The government has always assured that it is a “external attack” but claimed not to know who could be at the origin, while several Spanish media mentioned a possible involvement of Morocco in a context of serious diplomatic crisis between the two countries at the time of the events. In July, Spanish justice announced the provisional closure of the investigation into spying on members of the government, due to the absence “absolute” of cooperation from Israel.
Pegasus and NSO have faced serious accusations since a media consortium revealed in 2021 that the software had been used to spy on the phones of hundreds of politicians, journalists, human rights activists and of business leaders around the world.