First woman named in 2020 at the head of the CNI, Paz Esteban had recognized last week that the Prime Minister’s phones, Pedro Sanchez, and Catalan separatists had been spied on by her services.
Le Monde with AFP
The director of Spanish intelligence services, Paz Esteban, was dismissed on Tuesday May 10 by the government following the scandal caused by the revelation of the illegal listening of the Prime Minister, Pedro Sanchez, and independentists Catalans announced the Minister of Defense, Margarita Robles.
After analysis of the phones of all the ministers, the executive also revealed that the mobile of the Minister of the Interior had also been spied on last year by the Israeli software Pegasus, like those of Mr. Sanchez and M me robles.
First woman named, in 2020, at the head of the National Intelligence Center (or CNI, Pour Centro Nacional de Intelligéncia, in Spanish), Paz Esteban had appeared for several days as the upcoming expiatory victim of this spy scandal .
Crisis between government and Catalan separatists
She recognized last week that separatists had been spied on by her services, but still with the green light of justice, therefore legal. Government sources, cited in the media, assure that the executive had not been informed.
This case broke out in mid-April after the publication of a report by the Canadian organization Citizen Lab, who assured that he had identified more than sixty people from the Catalan separatist movement whose laptops would have been hacked between 2017 and 2020 by the PEGASUS spy software, created by the Israeli company NSO.
But she took a completely different scale with the announcement, on May 2, by the government that Mr. Sanchez and M robles had been spied on in May and June 2021 thanks to this same software. The scandal triggered a crisis between the minority government of Mr. Sanchez and the Catalan separatists, who threatened to withdraw their crucial support in Parliament.