On December 11, Leopoldo Puente, the coach of the Koldo case in the Supreme Court, summoned the experts who signed the reports of the Civil Guard and the defense of former PSOE Secretary Santos Cerdán about the authenticity of the recordings made by the former ministerial advisor Koldo Garcia between 2019 and 2023, which is one of the main pieces of evidence in the case, given the “discrepancies” between 2019 and 2023. Experts.
Puente explained in a document that it was necessary to listen to the two acting experts and the four Civil Guard “in order to clarify, supplement or specify” the results of their reports, in order to evaluate them.
This is because the judge considers it “appropriate” to know “as far as technically possible, the details as to whether the conversations contained in the audio files that were the subject of the expertise (…) were recorded directly on the stations where they were found” – those that were tuned during the search of Koldo’s house – “or if they could have come from other audio files”.
The judge’s goal is to determine “whether the audio files in question are original, in the sense that it can be excluded, as a matter of plausibility, that they may have been subjected to some type of manipulation, cutting or editing.”
The judge took the step after Cerdan’s defense submitted a report on November 26 concluding that the audio recordings in question represented “technical, temporal, structural and methodological discrepancies” which, according to the two experts who signed it, could only be explained “through export, reassembly or technical manipulation”.
Furthermore, they stress that these “irregularities” cannot be considered “incidental or attributable to the normal operation of the iOS operating system,” typical of iPhones.
Cerdan’s defense report adds that the technical quality of the audios shows that they “do not meet the minimum requirements for biometric identification of the speaker,” which is why they believe that “it cannot be scientifically confirmed that the voices analyzed correspond to the same person, nor can they be reliably attributed to any specific individual.”
Likewise, experts estimate a “serious lack of formal 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 operating units, nor that they have not gone through intermediate processes of copying, re-indexing, restoration or manipulation.”
However, experts do not rule out the hypothesis of alternative origins, such as “remote capture through spyware”, so “any claim of original authenticity lacks verifiable technical support.”
Cerdán’s defense has always disputed the authenticity of the audio recordings in question, arguing that the person who was an advisor to José Luis Albalos in the Ministry of Transport could have been a “secret agent” of the Civil Guard and could have manufactured or manipulated the recordings, or at least provoked certain conversations, knowing that he was recording them.
The former Socialist leader’s lawyers also raised in their writings the possibility of using a Pegasus-style computer program to make the recordings, mentioning in this sense that there are already courts investigating alleged espionage using this “spyware”.
Cerdán commissioned the expert report after subject matter experts from the Digital Engineering Section of the Criminal Investigation Service of the Civil Guard submitted their report last September in response to Puente’s request, which sought to determine whether the conversations seized from García “were recorded directly at the above-mentioned stations or whether they could have come from other audio files that were later recorded at those stations.”
The Civil Guard approved the audio recordings
Civil Guard experts did not identify “traces showing modifications, manipulations or anomalous behavior in the management of the iOS system – typical of iPhones – related to the voice memos application and audio recordings under study.”
They also explained that the audio recordings examined did not show signs of editing and the recordings matched the type of recorder and model of the device analyzed.
However, they point out, “Although the list of audio files in digital evidence retains creation and modification date metadata, the absence of logs and supplementary configuration files that the device can manage limits the reliability of accurately determining the precise moment at which they were recorded, and the inability to establish a reliable chronology of events.”
At this point, the experts also determined that because the recording device itself “does not save configuration files that reflect the user-selected time setting,” it was difficult for them to “accurately determine the actual recording dates.”
In another report on the acoustics of the same audio recordings, the Civil Guard came to the conclusion that “the results of all authenticity analyzes carried out on questionable files are more likely to be observed if the authenticity hypothesis is considered valid, than if the opposite hypothesis is considered valid.”
The experts also noted some irregularities, noting that there were some audio recordings for which “the date of classification was six months later than the date of recording,” that did not contain “internal date/time metadata, which limits the possibility of direct chronological traceability,” or that it was necessary to “conduct subsequent studies.”