“You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to look at the CNI” (National Intelligence Center), declared the Catalan regional president, Pere Aragonesein an interview on the radio station RAC1, when asked who was behind the alleged spying on 65 Catalan and Basque pro-independence leaders and their entourage.
“We have suspected for a long time that we were the target of the State intelligence services,” Aragonés added, calling the explanations given by Pedro Sánchez so far “insufficient.”
The case exploded on Monday, when Citizen Lab, a cybersecurity project at the Canadian University of Toronto, published a report identifying 65 people from the pro-independence orbit attacked or infected between 2017 and 2020 with Israeli espionage software. pegasusamong which were the last four Catalan regional presidents.
This NSO Group program allows you to read messages and remotely activate the phone’s camera and microphone. The Israeli company affirms that it only sells it to States, and after authorization from the Israeli parliament.
According to Amnesty International, it has been used “to ffacilitate the commission of human rights violations on a massive scale worldwide” and could be monitoring up to 50,000 phone numbers.
The views of the independence movement quickly turned to the Sánchez government, which depends on the parliamentary support of Catalan and Basque independentistas.
“If there is no assumption of responsibilities, it will be very difficult for this parliamentary stability to continue“, Aragonés threatened, when there are two years to go before the next general election in Spain.
The government spokeswoman, Isabel Rodríguez, denied the case Tuesday, saying that Spain “is a democratic and legal country, there is no spying here.” For her part, the Minister of Defense, Margarita Robles, assured Wednesday that all the actions of the CNI, which depends on her ministry, “are subject to judicial control and judicial authorization,” in statements to public television TVE.
Robles hid behind forced secrecy in intelligence matters so as not to confirm or deny whether the CNI has the Pegasus program, as the newspaper El País stated on Wednesday, which put the cost of the acquisition at six million euros (6, 5 million dollars).
According to El País, the CNI acquired the program to use it abroad, and Catalan independence fighters claim to have been spied on in several European countriesin which they were going to file lawsuits.
“We will not leave anything to be sued, and there will be lawsuits, some collective and others individual, in five different jurisdictions,” explained the former Catalan president. Carles Puigdemont at a press conference in Brussels on Tuesday.
Puigdemont left Spain after the failed attempt to proclaim independence in October 2017, the culmination of years of confrontation between the secessionists and the Spanish central government, then led by the conservative Mariano Rajoy (People’s Party).
Tensions have dropped considerably since then, particularly since Sánchez launched a negotiation with Aragonés in February 2020 and pardoned, in June 2021, nine pro-independence leaders imprisoned for the events of 2017.
It is unlikely that this episode will revive the pro-independence bases, estimated Oriol Bartomeus, professor of Political Science at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.
And yet, “the pro-independence base has been showing accelerated fatigue for a long time, since 2019. Therefore, episodes like this one provoke less and less reaction,” added Bartomeus.
Source: Ambito
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