Jan. 23 (UPI) — A judge in Spain’s highest court accused Israel of refusing to cooperate with a long-running investigation into the use of Israeli-developed Pegasus spyware to bug the phones of Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez and members of his government.
Jose Luis Calama, a judge in the criminal division of the National Criminal and Administrative Court, said Thursday that Jerusalem had ignored five requests for cooperation with the probe after it uncovered preliminary evidence of illegal gathering of classified information that “jeopardized” Spain’s national security.
Israeli authorities’ refusal to engage was in breach of international treaties and violated “the principle of good faith” between nations, he said.
The investigation, launched in 2022, into alleged hacking against Sanchez and Defense Minister Margarita Robles found that Sanchez’s phone was infected with the spyware developed by Israel’s NSO Group five times between 2020 and 2021, with more than 2.5 gigabytes of files stolen.
Robles’ phone was found to have been accessed four times over a five-month period in 2021, with the investigation later expanded to include cyberattacks targeting the phones of Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska and Agriculture Minister Luis Planas.
Spanish and British investigative journalists and Canadian cyberexperts found Pegasus was also used to target dozens of secessionist politicians in Catalan. Use of the software for spying purposes was sanctioned by Spanish intelligence in around a quarter of cases.
The breaches, along with the so-called CatalanGate scandal, cost Paz Esteban, Spain’s first woman spy chief, her job.
NSO maintains that Pegasus, which can be “pushed” to smart devices without any input or action from the owner, is only supplied to governments.
Calama wrote in a court document that Israel’s failure to respond to requests for information and documents from May 2022 through February 2025, including a request to question then-NSO Group CEO Shalev Hulio, “prevents us from advancing in the investigation of the facts.”
He said he was left with no option but to shelve the case for a second time due to the Israeli government’s “manifest breach of its international obligations.”
“The failure to execute the letters requesting cooperation addressed to the Israeli authorities prevents us from investigating, inevitably leading us to a provisional dismissal,” wrote Calama.
He previously mothballed his probe in july 2023 due to the lack of a suspect and the difficulties with conducting his inquiries, but reopened it in April 2024 after developments in France, where authorities were conducting a parallel investigation into the use of Pegasus against journalists, lawyers and politicians.