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Spy chief sacked over phones hack
SPAIN’S government has fired the director of the country’s top intelligence agency after the hacking of politicians’ phones, including the devices of the prime minister and several supporters of the Catalonia region’s secession.
The National Intelligence Centre (CNI) has been under fire for its role in spying on Catalan independence activists and for taking a full year to discover that the handsets of the prime minister and leading defence and security officials had been infiltrated, possibly by a foreign power.
Defence minister Margarita Robles, who was among the hacking targets, announced after a cabinet meeting that Paz Esteban would be relieved as CNI director.
“[The hacks of government phones] took a year to discover, it is clear there are things that we need to improve,” Robles said.
“We are going to try to ensure that these attacks don’t happen again, even though there is no way to be completely safe.”
Esteban’s replacement will be Esperanza Casteleiro, who has worked for almost 40 years at the intelligence agency, Robles said.
Esteban acknowledged during a closed-door parliamentary committee hearing last week that her agency had hacked the phones of several Catalan independence activists – with judicial permission.
In a separate case, the government recently revealed that an “external” power infected the phones of Robles and of Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez with the Pegasus spyware last year.
The phone of interior minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska, the head of Spain’s police and border control agencies, also was infected with the spyware at the same time as the defence minister’s phone.