The judge of the National Court José Luis Calama has agreed to the provisional dismissal of the case opened for the infection with the Pegasus computer program of the mobile devices of the Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, and the Ministers of Defense, Interior and Agriculture, Margarita Robles, Fernando Grande-Marlaska and Luis Planas, respectively.
The magistrate agrees to the file due to the “absolute” lack of legal cooperation from Israel, which has not answered the request sent by the National Court and has frustrated the continuation of the investigation.
In the order, the judge warns that the espionage “put in check the security of the State itself” although he regrets not being able to go ahead with the case for revealing secrets.
According to the evidence collected throughout the investigation, indicates the resolution, the infection of the Prime Minister’s mobile phone occurred five times, between October 2020 and December 2021. The first of the processes that have been detected as harmful occurred between May 19 and 21, 2021 and the amount of information “exfiltrated” between the two dates was at least 2.57 GB. The second was detected on May 31 and the “exfiltrated” information was 130 MB.
Regarding the Defense Minister’s mobile, according to the order, it shows signs of having been infected by Pegasus on four occasions, between May and October 2021, while that of the Interior Minister was infected on two occasions, on the 2nd and June 7 of the same year.
For its part, the Minister of Agriculture’s mobile phone, the text explains, was infected on June 25, 2021, although the amount of “exfiltered” information (less than 1 kb) suggests an unsuccessful infection attempt by the existence of one of the “vaccine” applications.
The analysis carried out on these four devices with the tools and techniques available at the CCN/CNI, as stated by this body, indicates the judge, does not allow the authorship of any of these infections to be determined.
In order to determine the identity of the people who would have committed the acts, explains the magistrate, a rogatory letter was addressed to Israel with a request for information from the company that owns Pegasus, NSO GROUP, and the request for a statement as a witness of your CEO. A request for international legal cooperation, which has had to be extended once and recalled twice for compliance.
“Unfortunately, at this procedural moment, more than a year after the issuance of the aforementioned letters rogatory, no response has been received, despite having been subject to extension once, and compliance reiterated on another couple of occasions. This silence clearly shows an absolute lack of legal cooperation on the part of the Government of Israel. Which allows us to presume that the letter rogatory in question, sent four times, will never be completed ”, warns the magistrate.
Calama understands that although the terms of Article 2 of the European Convention on Mutual Assistance in Criminal Matters provide considerable enforcement discretion to the State to which a request for legal cooperation is made, the exercise of this discretion is subject to the expressed obligation to good faith codified in article 26 of the Vienna Convention of 1969.
This, in his opinion, should oblige the State of Israel to externalize the reasons for the refusal to execute the rogatory letter, as well as justify that these have a place within those allowed by the aforementioned conventional stipulation.
“At this point, this court can do little or nothing to comply with the reference letter rogatory and, therefore, for the present investigation to move forward,” he adds.
Calama only sees as a single option that it is a question of negotiating with Israel through diplomatic channels so that it cooperates and complies with the obligations derived from international treaties, and whose exercise corresponds to the Government, in this case, moreover, the victim of the crime that is the object of investigation.
Undoubtedly, the State Attorney’s Office, appearing in the present proceedings, as the procedural representative of the General State Administration, “will promote the exercise of said path through the mechanisms that the Government of Spain has for such purposes”, points out .
For Calama, the procedural situation described places the procedure in what the Supreme Court describes as “investigative impotence”, which prevents knowing the reality of what happened, and which, in this case, means that “the process remains dormant or latent, until the information obtained through a punctual and unlikely fulfillment of the rogatory letter that Israel has obstructed or new sources of evidence, allow the continuation of the procedure.
