Two Civil Guard officers charged for the first time in the Pegasus case

BarcelonaA judge in Barcelona has formally charged two former Civil Guard directors, Félix Vicente Azón and María Gámez, for the first time in connection with the Pegasus spyware used to spy on Catalan independence, according to the EFE news agency. The case stems from a lawsuit filed by five of those affected by the spying, including businessman and former Junts senator Joan Matamala. Last September the judge accepted this lawsuit because they considered that the reported events could constitute crimes of discovery and disclosure of computer secrets and illegal access to computer systems.

The judge has also summoned former CNI director Paz Esteban to testify as a suspect, in addition to executives of the Israeli company NSO, which markets the Pegasus software, and also, for the first time in Spain, executives of Candiru, espionage software that the Spanish government has not previously acknowledged. The lawsuit was filed on April 30 of last year against Azón –who was director of the Civil Guard between 2018 and 2020– and Gámez –who led the Civil Guard until 2023–, but also against Esteban, who is already charged in four other cases related to this matter.

To date, NSO and the State of Israel have systematically refused to cooperate with the various judicial investigations launched in Spain regarding espionage. This lawsuit is the first to be filed also concerning the use of the Candiru spyware. The plaintiffs claim that this software was used by the Civil Guard to infect their mobile phones as part of the case opened in the National Court against the organizers of the anonymous platform Tsunami Democràtic, which called for protests against the verdict in the Catalan independence trial. The plaintiffs maintain that this infection was confirmed by analyses carried out by the Canadian laboratory Citizen Lab, which uncovered the case of mass surveillance of the Catalan independence movement.

In fact, the plaintiffs—businesspeople and technology developers grouped in the international association Sentinel Alliance—initially filed their complaint with the National Court, which refused to investigate it due to lack of jurisdiction, prompting them to take it to the courts in Barcelona.

In a statement, Sentinel Alliance maintains that the five plaintiffs—Joan Arús, Joan Matamala, Jordi Baylina, Pau Escrich, and Xavier Vives—all businesspeople and open-source developers, were spied on because of their professional activity. According to this group, for two years, starting in 2019, their devices were attacked with Pegasus and Candiru—military-grade spyware capable of extracting chats, emails, passwords, files, and photographs, and remotely activating the microphone and camera—and they put the number of attacks against them at 78.