One of the main pieces of evidence against David Morales, the former Spanish military man whose company spied on the conversations of Julian Assange and his lawyers during his stay at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, has disappeared. The Spanish Police did not deliver to the judge investigating the case the entire file of the Samsung S7 phone that Morales used to communicate with the alleged CIA agents to whom he facilitated the defense strategy of the founder of Wikileaks, according to documents from the judicial investigation. those that Morning Express has had access to. After repeated judicial requests, the agents have responded that “they do not know where he can be found” and Judge Santiago Pedraz has ordered his immediate recovery.
Prosecutor Carlos Bautista has complained about the disappearance of this file, which he describes as “essential” and has requested its search “because it contains more data than that made available to the parties.” “It is extremely striking that the police unit has delivered UFDR (Universal Forensic Data Report) and UFDX (Universal Forensic Data Exchange) files from the other devices and has not done so precisely from this one,” criticizes the public ministry. Previously, the Prosecutor’s Office had also expressed the “certain paralysis” caused by “the exasperating slowness of the police force acting in the analysis of all the elements intervened.”
The magistrate has summoned the agents of the Cybercrime Unit to appear in court and make a copy in his presence of both files on the Samsung S7 in an attempt to recover the omitted information and find out who is responsible for its disappearance. The National Police has declined to respond to this newspaper’s questions.
Samsung S7 key
During the search of Morales’ home and offices in Jerez de la Frontera, in September 2019, the primary objective of the investigators was precisely the intervention of the Samsug S7 G930F phone that the protected witnesses (company workers) had configured to allegedly communicate with the CIA. A detail that was communicated before the arrest to the agents who participated in the arrest. But the police handed over to Judge Pedraz the complete files of all the phones, computers and electronic devices seized, except for the Samsung ones. This police action has caused the Userdata folder, where the conversations held by Morales in the WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Proton Mail and Skype applications were located, to be removed from the case.
The owner of the company UC Global SL, a company that was in charge of security at the London embassy, was arrested two months after an investigation by this newspaper released the audios and videos that its workers recorded of the Australian activist inside the embassy. diplomatic legation. This material was presented as evidence in a complaint by Assange and an investigation began in the National Court for crimes of violation of attorney-client communications, misappropriation and money laundering.
Join Morning Express to follow all the news and read without limits.
Subscribe
The Samsung S7 was the only phone from which the information was extracted on site during the entries and searches of the police operation, a practice that was not carried out with any of the other phones and devices seized, according to the Police response to the requirements of the magistrate, who had to wait months until receiving a response from the agents. The police report sent to the Investigative Court number 5 of the National Court, which is handling the case, contrasts with the testimony of the lawyer from the Justice administration who recorded the intervention of all telephones.
The consequence of this anomaly has been that the file uploaded by the police unit to the cloud – in which the evidence obtained is downloaded and accessed by the parties involved in the case – is not the original and complete UFDX file, but only the UFDR file, which is derived from the previous one but does not represent the complete copy of the device. And the UFDR file provided by the agents is missing the Userdata folder, where the data of the applications that have disappeared are stored. Furthermore, Assange’s representation highlights that the UFDR file uploaded to the cloud does not come from the UFED Touch dump machine, as is the case with all the other phones in this investigation, but from a personal computer that has been registered.
The agent ‘Paisa’
The Samsung S7 phone had an alternative external keyboard called Swiftkey that records the words that are written on that device and thanks to that feature, experts have been able to partially rescue some conversations in English about the embassy, Assange, the CIA or the agent Paisa, a collaborator of Morales in the United States allegedly linked to the CIA. But these conversations do not appear recorded anywhere other than the keyboard as the Userdata folder where all the conversations from the disappeared applications were stored was deleted.
The General Commissariat of Judicial Police has responded to Judge Pedraz that on February 7, “all copies of the devices were delivered, with none remaining in this section. Thus, it is unknown where these files could be found and the location within the devices delivered,” says the police document. The magistrate has ordered the Technical Group of the Cybercrime Unit, the unit that carried out the dumps, to examine the hard drives delivered by the investigators and extract a copy of the UFDX and UFDR files from the former military man’s Samsung S7.
This is the second time that the complainants have discovered that the Police have omitted relevant information contained in the electronic devices seized from the owner of UC Global, SL. A new dump of Morales’ laptop revealed more than 213.1 gigabytes, 551,616 files and 973 email files that were hidden from the judicial investigator. It is the difference in the volume of the two copies, the one dumped by the police and the one obtained by Assange’s defense.
Among those new files, Morales saved a folder called “Operations&Projects” (Operations and Projects) with directories organized by geographical areas, in which files on the region or country and the services to be developed are detailed. In the area corresponding to North America, within the USA directory, there is a folder called CIA and a folder called Videos where images of the recordings that the cameras and hidden microphones of UC Global, SL recorded of the meetings of the founder of Wikileaks.
Investigacion@elpais.es
Follow all the international information on Facebook and xor in our weekly newsletter.
.
.
_