Bogotá. President Gustavo Petro has condemned the alleged illegal purchase of the Pegasus spy software from the Israeli company NSO Group Technologies by the police intelligence service (Dipol) of the previous government of Iván Duque denounced.
Pegasus may still be in use outside the current government’s intelligence services. It is not clear in whose hands the spy software is currently located, reports the state broadcast Investigative Signal and the magazine Raya.
The Israeli spy software can only be purchased by governments and works like a virus. Whoever uses it can access all documents, photos, emails and the location of a cell phone or computer. The device’s camera and microphone can also be remotely controlled to listen in on meetings.
In a televised address, Petro read out a report from a Swiss investigative agency from late August confirming the purchase of Pegasus. According to the report, Dipol paid $11 million in cash into an NSO Group account at the Israeli bank Hapolim 2021. The money was transported by plane from Bogotá to Tel Aviv.
The head of government suggested that the spy software could have been used against the nationwide protest movement in 2021 as well as against his own presidential campaign. At the time, secret video recordings of meetings of Petro’s campaign team were made public, allegedly made by Duque’s secret services. should.
According to Petro, the Swiss authority’s report raises several questions: “Who else did they wiretap? With what court order, as required by the Colombian constitution so that such wiretapping is not a crime? Where did the money come from? Why was it not officially included in the state budget?”
He expressed suspicion that the payment of the eleven million US dollars could be “money laundering by the state itself” and called on the Attorney General’s Office to investigate the case. Petro instructed the police chief to track down Pegasus.
After Stripes According to research, the money came from drug trafficking and was confiscated by Colombian authorities.
Already in March, journalist Gur Megiddo had written in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reportedthat the Duque government paid $13 million in cash to NSO Group for Pegasus in 2021.
According to Megiddo, the head of the Israeli Defense Ministry’s export department, Yair Kulas, supported the deal. Kulas have persuaded Bank Hapolim to allow the deposit despite concerns about money laundering. “Kulas acted as a guarantor for the bank,” explained Megiddo.
The Israeli journalist came across the affair while researching Kulas: “We knew that he was involved in such dealings and that he did things that were questionable.”
According to Raya, negotiations for the deal were led by Colombia’s former deputy defense minister, Jairo García, and Kula. They also finalized the purchase of other security products, such as a surveillance system to control the border with Venezuela, something the Duque government made no secret of at the time.
Four high-ranking officers of the armed forces at the time are said to have traveled to Israel to purchase Pegasus. In November 2021, Duque himself visited Tel Aviv. After his return, Pegasus was put into operation, according to Raya.
About three months ago, Constitutional Court judge Jorge Enrique Ibánez accused the Petro government of illegal espionage against him. This received a lot of media coverage. Ibánez later backtracked and clarified that he was not a victim of state espionage. The head of the National Intelligence Service, Carlos Ramón González, explained that Pegasus was not in the hands of the state security agencies. Behind this were retired military officers who wanted to destabilize the Petro government.
Investigative Signal confirmedthat the Attorney General’s Office is in possession of information about several retired “criminal generals” who are suspected of planning the destruction of the current secret service.
After Petro’s televised speech demanded The representative of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Colombia, Juliette de Rivero, called on the relevant authorities to investigate the purchase of Pegasus. This spy software “seriously violates the right to privacy, the right to freedom of expression and association, as well as other human rights.”
Meanwhile, the Attorney General’s Office has launched an investigation into the matter announced.
There are numerous cases of spying on journalists, human rights activists and opposition members using Pegasus in other countries in Latin America, for example in El Salvador and Mexico.
