The Prosecutor's Office asks the judge to investigate the hacking of Roger Torrent's mobile without charging the former director of the CNI


The Barcelona Prosecutor's Office has asked the judge to investigate the mobile phone hacking suffered in 2019 by the president of the Parliament, Roger Torrent, and the ERC deputy Ernest Maragall, but has refused to request for the moment the imputation of the then director of the CNI Félix Sanz Roldán, contrary to what is claimed by republican politicians.

Pegasus, the program that hacked Catalan politicians and spied on journalists and activists around the world

Pegasus, the program that hacked Catalan politicians and spied on journalists and activists around the world

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As tax sources explain to elDiario.es, the Public Ministry has informed the head of the 32nd investigating court of Barcelona in favor of admitting the complaint presented by Torrent and Maragall when they saw "criminal evidence" in the hacking of their phones, although not sees enough reasons to impute the former director of the CNI.

The two politicians they sued last July against Sanz Roldán and the Israeli business conglomerate NSO Group for "political espionage" linked to hacking their mobile phones via Pegasus spyware. In addition to your individual complaint, the Parliament denounced as an institution the "premeditated espionage" of the mobiles of Torrent and Maragall by declaring "directly violated as an institution" by hacking the terminals.

Before deciding whether to admit the complaint or not, the judge asked the opinion of the computer crimes service of the Barcelona Public Prosecutor's Office. Once the prosecutor's report has been collected, the magistrate has agreed to open a case. However, the judge is still pending to decide how many proceedings requested by the accusations he orders.

Torrent and Maragall maintain in their complaint that there are sufficient indications to consider the hacking of their cell phones was caused by a "political espionage motive" from the CNI. In his view, hacking their phones could constitute the crimes of unauthorized intrusion into computer equipment, illegal interception of communications, computer espionage and "other crimes against fundamental rights."

ERC leaders point to Sanz Roldán because he was the CNI director at the time of the attack and because the NSO Group only sells the Pegasus program to government intelligence agencies. For its part, the Prosecutor's Office, in its first assessment of the espionage of the President of the Parliament, shares with Torrent the fact that the hacking must be investigated, and for this reason it has asked the judge for several steps, but does not see that there are currently reasons to proceed against the former chief of intelligence services.

The investigations requested by Torrent and Maragall seek to find both the origin and the perpetrators of the espionage and, if agreed by the judge, would give an international judicial dimension to the investigation by requiring rogatory commissions with Israel: the politicians want the judge to claim NSO The Group did sell the Pegasus program to the Government, with which executive bodies and those responsible for them who participated in the commissioning, contracting and requests for technical support.

Likewise, Torrent and Maragall ask the magistrate to require the company that markets Pegasus to deliver the data or computer records that it may keep relating to the eventual contract to obtain the spy program from the Government. They also claim the details of all the computer equipment the hack was directed at.

After what El País and The Guardian unveil the hacking of Torrent's phone in April 2019, the Defense Ministry denied that the CNI was behind the attack. The ERC politicians want to corroborate this version and for this reason they have asked the judge to request the declassification of reserved material and that the government's intelligence affairs commission certify whether the CNI "or any other government body" acquired or used the Pegasus program and if you were hired by NSO Group "or any other company".

To finish connecting the dots, the ERC politicians asked the magistrate to request the Ministry of Defense of Israel to certify whether, in accordance with its legislation on exports in Defense matters, the NSO Group has registered the export to Spain of Pegasus and any type of software , as well as the natural and legal persons to whom it was sold "from 2015 to the present." Finally, they also want to find out if the telephone and WhatsApp operators keep data from the moment of the hack.

Apart from the judicial investigation, Torrent has also brought the case of spying on his mobile phone to the United Nations, the Council of Europe and Amnesty International after WhatsApp confirmed that his mobile phone was one of the targets of the 2019 attack taking advantage of a vulnerability bug.

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