Court postpones verdict in major criminal case over Sky ECC

Court postpones verdict in major criminal case over Sky ECC

The Amsterdam court has postponed the verdict in the large Cherokee cocaine case indefinitely pending further information from the Public Prosecution Service about the hacking of Sky ECC’s server in France. The lawyers had argued on the basis of French documents that the Public Prosecution Service had incorrectly informed the court about the Sky ECC hack.

After Crimesite revealed this spring that a document from the court in Paris shows that Dutch police specialists had developed the tool to perform the hack on the French server (and that the tool could therefore not be a French state secret), it appears now from another document that the Netherlands was already working on Sky ECC in 2018 and submitted a request for mutual legal assistance to France for this.

The Public Prosecution Service makes it appear that the SKY ECC hack was an entirely French initiative that the Netherlands and Belgium joined. To this end, the countries had set up a so-called JIT (Joint Investigation Team) on 13 December 2019.

The Public Prosecution Service has been silent in all explanations to the courts about the request for legal assistance to France from a year earlier. Lawyer Marcel van Gessel has submitted a document from the Court of Appeal in Douai which shows that a European legal assistance request had already been made on 3 December 2018.

At Friday’s hearing, the court would rule in the Cherokee cocaine case, which concerns the smuggling of many thousands of kilos. Instead, the court posed further questions about the issue of the Sky ECC hack to prosecutors. They voluntarily promised that they would submit all (French) documents and authorizations related to the hack in France to the court.

It appears that the court wants to know more about how Sky ECC’s pgp chats, the core of the evidence in the case, were collected. The lawyers have argued that this information should be accessed because the Criminal Procedure Code requires it and because the accused should have the right to a fair trial.

Pending the documents from the Public Prosecution Service, the court postponed the date of the verdict indefinitely and the suspects remain free to await their trial.

Lawyer Van Gessel in response:

I wonder more and more: what was the reason for the Public Prosecution Service to do that hack of Sky ECC in this way and to present the cases to the judge in this way. There are very big criminal cases at stake, about drug and life crimes. By taking the risk of informing the courts so incompletely, the chance that those cases will now break is not inconceivable.

The developments in this Cherokee criminal case will be followed closely by the participants in other criminal cases. The Public Prosecution Service has not stated a term within which the national prosecutor’s office will provide the explanations.

Lawyers want to hear from prosecutors about Sky ECC

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