Coke case: Prosecutors demand lifting of pre-trial detention and further investigation Sky hack – suspects go home (UPDATE2)

Coke case: Prosecutors demand lifting of pre-trial detention and further investigation Sky hack – suspects go home (UPDATE2)

While watching live messages from Sky ECC users, the Dutch police have read and stored the messages of at least sixteen persons who are secret holders, such as lawyers. There may be even more. In the case where this became apparent on Friday, the court released all suspects. What is special is that this happened at the request of the case prosecutors, who agreed with the lawyers that further investigation is needed into the circumstances of the Sky hack.

Subsequently, the Dutch, Belgian and French police were able to read live messages from Sky ECC users in the period from 15 February 2021 to 9 March 2021.

Attorney Haroon Raza used a Sky phone. He told the court that it is clear from the file that his Sky messages have been read by the police and have also been kept for at least a year.

The detectives have reported that sixteen Sky accounts of suspected secret keepers have been registered by the police until September 2021.

The normal procedure is that if the police receive these kinds of messages or conversations, they are set aside and immediately destroyed after consultation. That did not happen in the Sky investigation, says Raza, based on the documents in the file.

Many more messages from secret keepers have probably been read. The sixteen accounts (and messages) only concern the state of affairs as of September 2021, while thousands of new messages are still available to the criminal investigation department from the computers of the Netherlands Forensic Institute (NFI). They flow from the sea of ​​tens of millions of Sky messages that the police managed to intercept during the hack.

It appears from e-mail correspondence between lawyer Haroon Raza and the criminal investigation officer of the national public prosecutor’s office Evert Harderwijk that the criminal investigation department and the judiciary could at least have known in Raza’s case that he was using an Encro and Sky telephone.

His Encro address was debestevangenpleiter.nl and he also reported his Sky address after the EncroChat hack became known (in July 2020). He also mentioned his Sky address in every e-mail to the police, the judiciary and the court. Every year, Raza reported his Sky use directly to the special reporting address of the Public Prosecution Service.

“It can hardly be any clearer,” Raza told the court.

Nevertheless, it now appears from a letter from the Public Prosecution Service in a large cocaine case that Raza’s messages have been discussed substantively with a criminal prosecutor and even with the chief public prosecutor of the national prosecutor’s office (so no public prosecutors who have to keep their knowledge secret).

Raza called that “incomprehensible”.

Yet that is not all. It seems that the Public Prosecution Service has deliberately read and saved the messages of the secret-keepers, while this is not allowed according to the law.

In court, Raza quoted from an email dated January 12, 2021 to detective officer Evert Harderwijk, so in the period that the detective was secretly listening, the Sky users must, but this was not yet publicly known.

Raza asked Harderwijk why he had never responded to previous reports by Raza of his use of Sky, EncroChat and PGPSafe. And he also asked Harderwijk for confirmation of the discovery and destruction of his messages. This is because the Special Investigative Powers Act states that this must be done.

Harderwijk replied to Raza that this would not happen. And in March of this year, the Public Prosecution Service confirmed in communication with the dean of the Bar Association that messages from Raza’s Sky account were read, saved and saved. The same happened with messages from other lawyers using Sky ECC or EncroChat.

Raza: ‘The Public Prosecution Service simply did not care about the law.’

This all came to the fore at the Rotterdam court on Friday in the first preparatory session of the mega case “Rosie”, about bringing in several large consignments of cocaine in the port of Rotterdam.

The lawyers of the three suspects had presented the same defense as in the case that was played before the court in Amsterdam last week. The court would rule there, but postponed the date of the final judgment indefinitely to allow further investigation into the Sky hack.
Remarkable

It is very remarkable that now before the Rotterdam court the officers

Found this interesting? Then check our main news page where you can find all articles related to Crypto, Crime, Darknet, Security and much more!