The speaker of the “Koldo case” at the Supreme Court (TS), Leopoldo Puente, will question this Thursday the experts who signed the reports of the Civil Guard and the defense of the former organizational secretary of the PSOE Santos Cerdán about the authenticity of the records of the former ministerial advisor Koldo García between 2019 and 2023, one of the most important pieces of evidence in the case given the “discrepancies” between experts.
In a document to which Europa Press had access, Puente explained that it was necessary to listen to the two experts on behalf and the four from the Guardia Civil “to clarify, complete or specify the outcome of their reports” in order to evaluate them.
This is because the judge considers it “relevant” “to know, as far as technically possible, details about whether the conversations reproduced in the audio files that were the subject of the report (…) were recorded directly on the terminals in which they were found” – which were seized during the search of Koldo’s house – “or whether they could come from other audio files.”
The judge’s goal is to determine “whether the audio files are authentic in the sense that it can be reasonably ruled out that they may have been manipulated, edited or edited.”
The judge took this step after Cerdán’s defense presented a report on November 26 that concluded that the audio recordings contained “technical, temporal, structural and methodological inconsistencies,” which, according to the two experts who signed the report, can only be explained “by export, assembly or technical manipulation.”
Furthermore, they claim that these “irregularities” cannot be considered “accidental or due to the normal operation of the iOS operating system, typical of iPhones.”
Cerdán’s defense report further states that the technical quality of the audio recordings shows that “they do not meet the minimum requirements for biometric identification of the speaker”, which is why, in her opinion, “it cannot be scientifically claimed that the analyzed voices correspond to the same person, nor that they can be reliably attributed to a specific person”.
Likewise, the experts see a “critical lack of official expertise” as well as an “insurmountable break in the logical chain of custody,” as they warn that “it cannot be said with certainty that the files examined correspond to the first forensic copies obtained by the acting entities and that they have not undergone any intermediate processes of copying, re-indexing, recovery or manipulation.”
However, the experts do not rule out the hypothesis of alternative origins such as “remote capture by ‘spyware,'” so “any claim of original authenticity lacks verifiable technical support.”
Cerdán’s defense has always disputed the authenticity of these audio recordings, assuming that the person who acted as adviser to José Luis Ábalos in the Ministry of Transport could have been an “undercover agent” of the Guardia Civil who could have manufactured or manipulated the recordings or at least provoked certain conversations, even though he knew he was recording them.
The former socialist leader’s lawyers have also raised in their writings the possibility that a computer program similar to Pegasus was used for the recordings, recalling in this sense that there are courts that are already opening investigations into alleged espionage using this “spyware”.
Cerdán commissioned this report after the technical experts of the Digital Engineering Department of the Criminalistic Service of the Civil Guard presented their report last September in response to Puente’s request to determine whether the conversations seized from García “were recorded directly in the above-mentioned terminals or whether they could come from other audio files subsequently recorded there”.
THE CIVIL GUARD SUPPORTED THE AUDIOS
The Guardia Civil experts did not find any “traces that indicate alterations, manipulations or anomalous behavior in the management of the iOS system – typical of iPhones – related to the voice note application and the audios examined.”
As they explained, the audios examined do not show any traces of editing and the recordings correspond to the recorder type and model of the device analyzed.
However, they pointed out that “although the list of audio files found in the digital evidence contains the metadata of creation and modification dates, the lack of recordings and supplementary configuration files that the device could manage limits the reliability of pinpointing the exact time of their recording and cannot establish a reliable chronology of events.”
At this point, the experts also stated that it was difficult for them to “accurately specify the actual recording dates” because the recording device itself “does not store configuration files that reflect a user-defined time setting.”
In another report on the acoustics of the same audio recordings, the Guardia Civil concluded that “it is more likely to observe the results of all the authenticity analyzes carried out on the doubtful files when the authenticity hypothesis is the one that is considered true than when the opposite hypothesis is considered true.”
The experts also noted some irregularities, pointing out that there were some audios where “the tagging date was six months distant from the recording date,” which did not have “internal date/time metadata, limiting direct temporal traceability,” or that it was necessary to “conduct subsequent investigations.”
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