The European Parliament’s commission of inquiry into the Pegasus case assumed this Monday that it was the Spanish authorities who spied on the Catalan pro-independence politicians, 18 of whom had judicial authorization, questioning the proportionality of the wiretapping.
“Based on a series of indicators, some of which were admitted by the Official Secrets Commission (of the Congress of Deputies), it is assumed that the surveillance of the Catalan targets was in charge of the Spanish authorities,” the report states. of the commission. after more than a year of work.
The Spanish Government has always maintained in the Congress of Deputies that the investigations were carried out with judicial authorization and that it is obliged to keep them secret.
The commission was created in April 2022 by the European Parliament (EP) to investigate the use of harmful computer programs (known as malware), such as Pegasus, in member states of the European Union (EU).
Pegasus is a computer program developed in Israel that has been sold to various states.
Among the politicians listened to by the MEPs in Madrid were the Catalan separatists, such as the president of the Generalitat, Pere Aragonès, one of the spy targets with Pegasus.
The report of the European Parliament committee, approved by 30 votes in favour, three against and four abstentions, also points to Morocco as possible responsible for spying on the mobile phones of the President of the Spanish Government, Pedro Sánchez, Defense Minister, Margarita Robles, and the Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska.
At the end of a two-day visit to Madrid by nine Commission MEPs, on March 21, they stressed that “not always” the targets or alleged targets of espionage in Spain claimed to have had access to all the information and transparency they wanted, just as they feel that their cases have not been investigated effectively and impartially.
The EP mission also said that it only met with one member of the Spanish government, the Secretary of State for the European Union, Pascual Navarro, and regretted not having been able to listen to the ministers with portfolios more directly related to the issue in question and others. , including the Prime Minister, who were victims of espionage.
The Dutch MEP Jeroen Lenaers (European People’s Party) recognized that the calendar was complicated for the Spanish Government, since the visit of the EP mission coincided with a public holiday in the Community of Madrid (Monday) and the debate on a motion of censorship in Parliament.
Jeroen Lenaers rejected the idea that the Spanish Executive wanted to hinder or boycott the work of the EP mission, contrary to what happened in Poland or Hungary.
Even so, in the statement that he read to the journalists, the MEP called on the Spanish authorities to collaborate with the justice system in the investigation of cases of espionage with harmful computer programs.
Lenaers reiterated that after the information gathered in the meetings in Madrid, the reasons that led to the espionage with Pegasus of 18 Catalan separatists with judicial authorization from the Spanish secret services are still not clear.
A preliminary version of the report, released in November, dedicated specific chapters to Spain, Greece, Cyprus, Poland and Hungary.
According to that document, in Spain there were “a large number of targets for espionage programs”, but apparently, “they were subject to surveillance by different agents and for different reasons”.
Source: TSF
