The director of the National Intelligence Center (CNI), Esperanza Casteleiro, and her predecessor in power, Paz Esteban, denied this Thursday before the judge that the center had spied on Andreu Van den Eynde, Oriol Junqueras’ lawyer, in 2020, according to information declassified by the Council of Ministers, reports the EFE agency.
Casteleiro, as witness, and Esteban, as investigator, appeared this Thursday by videoconference before investigating judge number 24 of Barcelona, who is investigating the complaints of Van den Eynde and former MEP Jordi Solé for spying on their cell phones with Pegasus software.
This is the third time that Esteban, fired following the scandal of massive spying on the independence movement with Pegasus, has declared himself accused of attacks on mobile phones with this malicious software. Currently, five cases are under investigation.
However, Esteban said he was aware of the existence of an expert report which confirms the trace of Pegasus on Van den Eynde’s phone, as well as a report from Amnesty International which claims that, after a request through the Transparency Law, the Ministry of the Interior confirmed that the State Security Forces and Agencies do not have the aforementioned “spyware”, according to the same judicial sources.
In the lawyer’s case there is no Mossos d’Esquadra expert because the Barcelona court rejected it, but an expert from Citizen Lab found that he suffered an attack with Pegasus on his cell phone in 2020, coinciding with a videoconference meeting with the trial lawyers.
Following the statement by Casteleiro and Esteban, Irídia regretted that the CNI continues without giving explanations “on one of the biggest cases of espionage with Pegasus in Europe”, taking refuge, according to the entity, in a restrictive legal framework that does not guarantee the minimum guarantees required by international standards.
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