The Spanish government said on Monday that the phones of Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez and Defense Minister Margarita Robles had been subjected to "external" and "illegal" wiretaps using the Israeli Pegasus software.
"These are not assumptions," Presidential Affairs Minister Felix Bolanos said during a hastily held press conference, referring to "extremely dangerous" incidents recorded in 2021.
"We have the absolute certainty that it is an external attack ... because in Spain in a democratic system like ours, all the interventions are carried out by official bodies after judicial authorization," he added, adding that the Ministry of Justice had been informed of the incident and the Supreme Court would take over the case.
double target
"In the context of the present case, neither of these two things happened ... so we have no doubt that it is related to external interference," Bolanos explained.
The minister did not specify whether the Spanish authorities found any clues leading to the source of this interference and whether it was related to a foreign country.
"When we talk about external interference, we mean that it was not the work of official bodies and was not carried out with a judicial mandate," Bolanos said.
Bolanos indicated that Sanchez's phone was targeted twice, in May 2021, and Robles' phone once in June 2021.
In both cases, the targeting allowed "to obtain a specific amount of data in the two mobile phones," according to the Spanish minister.
He stressed that there is no evidence of other eavesdropping operations after these dates.
Citizen Lab report
Once downloaded to a mobile phone, Pegasus, produced by the Israeli company NSO, allows eavesdropping on the phone's user by viewing messages, data, photos and contacts, as well as activating the microphone and camera remotely.
Earlier, Amnesty International said that this software may have been used to hack about 50,000 mobile phones in the world.
The case of espionage was revealed on April 18, when the Citizen Lab project on cybersecurity from the University of Toronto, Canada, published a report that identified 65 people from separatist circles, most of whom are from Catalonia, whose mobile phones were tapped between 2017 and 2020 by Israeli software.
After allegations of spying on members of the separatist movement, the left-wing pro-independence Catalan party ARC, the main ally of the minority government in parliament, said it would not support it until it took measures to restore confidence.