The Barcelona judge investigating the espionage of Pere Aragonès already has on the table the judicial documents that supported the infection of his mobile phone with the Pegasus software. The submission of the documentation occurs on the eve of the statement of the former director of the CNI, Paz Esteban. This has been confirmed to La Vanguardia by judicial sources. Esteban will have to give explanations this Friday in court as an investigator. The magistrate asked the Government to declassify documents to find out the reason for the intrusion into the telephone of the then vice president of the Generalitat. The Government accepted the request but only authorized a partial declassification of the documents and today it has sent three orders from the Supreme Court in which it endorsed the espionage on Pere Aragonès between 2019 and 2020. This is the only documentation to which both the judge will have access like the parts. These are three communications from the Supreme Court that covered espionage on the then vice president: one from July 2019 to allow the attack with malicious software and two other three-month extensions in October 2019 and January 2020.
The head of the 29th investigative court of Barcelona, Santiago García García, requested not only the court orders that authorized the espionage, but also all the information that the CNI has in relation to the purchase and use of the Israeli Pegasus software and about the “ “specific people” who acted on behalf of this organization in the commissioning, acquisition and reception processes of the program, as well as its use to spy on Aragonès. However, the Council of Ministers has denied the judge access to the rest of the information about the CNI's actions, arguing that this could endanger the safety of the secret service agents.
Esteban, who was dismissed as a result of the Pegasus scandal, admitted in Congress that the CNI spied on twenty pro-independence politicians, including Aragonès, always with the approval of the Supreme Court judge, but she dissociated herself from the rest of the eavesdropping, until 65, denounced by the independence movement.
Pere Aragonès testified as a witness in December and assured that his mobile phone was infected at times when he was carrying out relevant negotiations such as the motion of censure against Mariano Rajoy, the first investiture of Pedro Sánchez, the approval of the budgets and the constitution of the dialogue table.
