MADRID —
Spain’s intelligence service CNI had court approval to spy on Catalan
separatist figures, the El Pais newspaper said Tuesday citing sources close to
the agency.
اضافة اعلان
The spying targeted selected individuals and was not
“massive” as alleged, according to the unnamed sources cited by the paper.
Canada’s Citizen
Lab group said Monday at least 65 people linked to the Catalan separatist
movement had been targets of Pegasus spyware after a failed independence bid in
2017.
Elected officials, including current and former
Catalan regional leaders, were among those targeted by the controversial
spyware made by Israel’s NSO group.
Pegasus infiltrates mobile phones to extract data or
activate a camera or microphone to spy on their owners.
Citizen Lab,
which focuses on high-tech human rights abuses, said it could not directly
attribute the spying operations, but that circumstantial evidence pointed to
Spanish authorities.
But the intelligence service sources cited by El
Pais said the number of Catalan separatists who were spied on was “much lower”
than Citizen Lab’s figure, and the CNI “always acted under the control of the
courts”.
Contacted by AFP, the CNI was not immediately
available for comment.
Spain’s central government on Sunday said it would
launch inquiries. The government has not denied nor confirmed whether it uses
Pegasus or similar spyware, saying only that any surveillance is carried out
under the supervision of judges.
Catalonia’s regional leader Pere Aragones has said
the region will halt political collaboration with the Spanish government until
Madrid clarifies its role.
Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s minority socialist
coalition relies on Catalan and Basque separatist parties to pass legislation.
Catalonia in northeast Spain has been for several
years at the center of a political crisis between separatists, who control the
executive and the regional parliament, and the central government in Madrid.
Tensions had eased since dialogue began between
Sanchez’s government and the regional authorities in 2020 and the granting of
pardons to nine pro-independence leaders last year.
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