European Parliament Report Implicates Morocco in Spanish Government Phone Hacking Scandal

The first hacking would have taken place on May 19, 2021, a few hours after the Council of Ministers, chaired by Sánchez, approved an aid of 30 million euros for the benefit of Morocco. According to the report from the National Cryptological Center sent to the National Court, the hackers extracted 2.6 gigabytes of information from the president of the government’s mobile phone alone. A computer attack that is linked, according to the clues and the coincidence of the dates, to Spain’s unilateral turnaround in the conflict between Morocco and Algeria over the Sahara.

Since then, it has been nothing but speculation and suspicion. Within this commission, the espionage of 18 Catalan leaders was also examined and the concluding report considers that it was the "Spanish authorities" who carried it out. Although all the wiretaps were authorized by a judge, the proportionality of these is questioned, which has provoked the protest of several Spanish parties.

Implicated, Morocco categorically denied, in a press release, the use of the Pegasus software by its security services. The government had expressed "its great astonishment at the publication of erroneous information in which their authors falsely claim that Morocco has infiltrated the telephones of several national and foreign public figures and officials of international organizations through a computer software".

"Morocco is a state of law, which guarantees the confidentiality of personal communications by the force of the Constitution and by virtue of the Kingdom’s conventional commitments and the legal and non-judicial laws and mechanisms guaranteeing the protection of personal data and cybersecurity to all citizens and foreign residents in Morocco," the government had specified, according to which the Constitution prohibits and punishes this practice. The authorities could therefore not make use of it.