The judge in the Pegasus case admits another popular accusation but will exclude intimate information and information on State security

Lawyers opposed the admission alleging that the facts suppose an attack on the right to privacy of Sánchez and his ministers

MADRID, 8 Jul. (EUROPA PRESS) -

The judge of the National Court in charge of investigating the alleged espionage of the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, and the Ministers of Defense and Interior, Margarita Robles and Fernando Grande-Marlaska, with the Pegasus program through their mobile phones, has admitted the appearance of the Association for the Prevention and Study of Crimes, Abuses and Negligence in Computing and Advanced Communications (APEDANICA) as a popular accusation, while warning that all intimate information that affects State security will be expurgated from the case.

In a car from this same Friday, collected by Europa Press, the head of the Central Court of Instruction Number 4, José Luis Calama, has set as a requirement to appear in person the payment of a bail of 10,000 euros in order to avoid abuse or use fraudulent of the procedural figure of the popular accusation.

The decision to admit APEDANICA comes with the criteria against the State Attorney's Office, which opposed it on the understanding that the facts investigated suppose an attack on the right to privacy of people, which is the legal right protected by the crime of disclosure. of secrets

The Prosecutor's Office was also against the appearance, considering that the aforementioned association did not have "a legitimate interest in the case" and alleging that it could "be detrimental to the development of the procedure."

However, the judge considers that the aforementioned crime not only affects the legal right to privacy and informative self-determination but also to "general interests". In this regard, it adds that the facts transcend the private sphere, as the State Attorney has understood it when presenting its complaint on behalf of the person of the President of the Government and the Minister of Defense, whose representation in a private capacity does not hold, but of the State Administration itself.

Likewise, Calama understands that this private sphere is transcended for having filed the complaint in the National High Court as it is a crime against "senior organizations of the Nation and form of Government."

And it is that, for the judge, the admission of the popular accusation is not incompatible with the preservation of the data related to the privacy of the people affected by the facts investigated.

For this reason, the magistrate warns that prior to the joining of any documentation, regardless of the support, "any information related to the intimate life of people, State security or any other type of information irrelevant to the cause".

Regarding the allegations of the Prosecutor's Office, the magistrate explains that the abuse of popular action by associations, political parties, unions and another series of organizations that, at times, use it for purposes unrelated to Justice, has given rise to to successive bills to reform the Law of Criminal Procedure to limit the scope of said figure.

Despite this, it explains that "as long as a new legal configuration of said figure is not approved" it must "address its current regulation in accordance with the terms set forth". "This is required by the principle of legality," he adds.

In this regard, he continues, it is not up to his Court "to investigate what are the reasons that may be found in the background of the filing of the complaint." "Which is not an obstacle to the fact that the present instructor will only admit the requests presented by any of the parties, regardless of their procedural status, that have as their object any of the purposes" established in the law, for which they will be rejected, says, the proceedings with prospective or spurious purposes are either impertinent or useless", he concludes.

This is the second time that the instructor admits the personification of an association as a popular accusation. On June 17, the magistrate opened the case for the Prolege European Jurists Association, which he also urged to pay that amount. However, Prolege has not managed to collect the amount set by the magistrate to date.

Calama began to investigate on April 26, pointing to possible crimes of discovery and disclosure of secrets, after the complaint filed by the State Attorney for the infection of the mobile phones of the President of the Government and the Minister of Defense, a complaint that was expanded later after also confirming the intrusion into Grande-Marlaska's phone.

In that first resolution, the instructor provided details on the initial complaint filed by the State Attorney's Office, according to which, after the analysis of the mobile devices of the chief executive and the head of defense carried out by the CERT on April 30, "It has been known that they were the object of several infections by the Pegasus tool, mobile device spy 'software', between the months of May and June 2021".

The reports of the National Cryptologic Center on the cell phones of Sánchez and Robles highlighted that "the mobile device of the President of the Government analyzed was infected by Pegasus on two occasions (on May 19, 2021 and May 31, 2021)", while Robles would have been infected in June of that year.

In both cases, Calama collected, the reports stated that "information exfiltration occurred", but currently neither of the two phones present "known indicators of ongoing Pegasus infection".

The first of the intrusions in Sánchez's mobile would have occurred in the context of the massive entry of some 10,000 immigrants into Ceuta between May 17 and 18, 2021, which precisely led Sánchez to visit the autonomous city on this second day, as well like Melilla, with the Minister of the Interior.

In addition, on May 18 it was when Morocco called its ambassador in Madrid, Karima Benyaicha, for consultations, the one who had been summoned in Foreign Affairs to protest the events in Ceuta. On the same day, the 19th, Sánchez was in a session to control the Government in the Congress of Deputies.

The second would have taken place when the President of the Government was with the Prime Minister of Poland, Mateusz Morawiecki, in Alcalá de Henares on the occasion of the XIII Spanish-Polish Summit. That day, Morocco published a statement in which it indicated that the diplomatic crisis was motivated by the government's position regarding the Sahara, not by the reception of the leader of the Polisario Front, Brahim Ghali.

Precisely, the latter declared on June 1, 2021 as accused before Judge Santiago Pedraz in the National High Court for the complaint filed by the Saharawi Association for the Defense of Human Rights (ASADEH) for genocide and hours later he flew back to Algeria.

As for the mobile phone of the Minister of the Interior, the Government reported after Grande-Marlaska suffered two attacks in the same June 2021. In the first of them 4 megabytes were stolen and in the second a much larger volume of information , 6.3 gigabytes.

The analysis of the terminals of other members of the Government was also able to determine an attempt to infect the phone of the head of Agriculture, Luis Planas, which was unsuccessful, and also occurred in June of last year.