The agents recovered part of the information although they were unable to decode it to find out more details.
MADRID, Jan. 27 (EUROPA PRESS) -
The Central Criminalistics Unit of the Scientific Police certified after the analysis of the mini SD of former Podemos adviser Dina Bousselham that the card was irreparable, making it impossible to determine who was the last person who had access to it, how it was destroyed or what kind of files it contained.
This follows from the report prepared by the Forensic Engineering and Computer Science Section, to which Europa Press has had access, in which the Police informed the investigating judge of the piece 'Dina', Manuel García-Castellón, that "the controller of the card" was "damaged", which did not allow "access to the information through the ordinary reading procedure".
"Existing controller corruption" prompted agents to attempt "reading the card via direct memory access through its NAND interface." Thus, of the two 16-gigabyte crystals that make up the memory, the researchers could only access one of them.
Specifically, the only accessible crystal was the one addressed by the CE1 signal, "which would indicate the existence of damage to the other crystal, addressed with the CEO signal, or damage to the electronics that control access to it". "In both cases it would not be possible to repair it," they certify.
Thus, and despite the fact that the content of the 18.2 GB read from the accessible glass was stored in a file, the agents point out that it was not possible to "identify it, which is why it has not been possible to recover the files or the file structure, not even partially.
Along these lines, the report also makes it clear that "it is not possible to determine the etiology" of the damage "nor the time at which it occurred", making it also impossible to determine the date of last access to the card.
And, with regard to its content, the Scientific Police assures that "its recovery has not been possible, not even partially, due to the fact that the transformations carried out by the damaged controller on the digital information have not been identified, and whose knowledge is necessary to be able to reverse the encoding process".
That is what prevents, according to their report, "access to the file structure of the card and, therefore, the recovery of information of the data related to the dates of access, modification, creation or deletion of the files that were stored in memory at the time".
A DECISION AFTER KNOWING THE STATUS OF THE CARD
This report, dated January 21, was sent to the head of the Central Investigating Court Number 6 who, within the framework of this separate piece of the 'Tándem' macro-cause, agreed more than a year ago to prosecute retired commissioner José Manuel Villarejo and two journalists. In addition, it proposed to the Supreme Court that it investigate the former Vice President of the Government Iglesias for discovery and disclosure of secrets, with gender aggravation, computer damage and false accusation or complaint and/or simulation of the crime.
However, the high court then ordered the magistrate to continue investigating, expressly indicating several procedures, including taking Dina's statement again, to clarify whether she wanted to report the facts and including the expert report on the micro card among those same instructions.
Now, and once it has been impossible to gut the card, the judge could shelve the investigations or continue investigating. Doing so opens the possibility that the investigations will not be carried out in the National High Court but in the Madrid courts, given that the crimes to be investigated would not have sufficient entity.
DINA CONSIDERED THE REPORT UNNECESSARY
It was last October when the Criminal Chamber of the National Court endorsed the magistrate's decision to ask the Scientific Police to determine if it was "technically possible" to access the content of Bousselham's mobile phone card, to elucidate the path that the card had since it was stolen until its information appeared published.
In contrast, the former 'purple' adviser argued that this report was unnecessary because the Police had already issued one in August 2020 where it concluded that the damage suffered by the telephone card was due to excessive sanding during the process carried out by a private company hired by Bousselham herself to try to recover the contents of the mini SD.
The report commissioned from the Technical Section of Engineering and Computer Forensics of the Scientific Police Unit took longer than expected because the investigators lacked a series of keys that the telephone company, in this case, Samsung, had to provide.
THE ORIGIN OF THE DINA CASE
In the car with which he decided to end the investigation phase, the judge established the origin of the case in some files found at the entrance and registry of Villarejo's home in 2017 in which there was personal information of the one who was an adviser to Iglesias as well as sensitive data of the 'purple' party.
As he explained, in November 2015 the coat of the couple from Bousselham --Ricardo Antonio Sa Ferreira-- was stolen from the IKEA in Alcorcón, inside which there were several objects, among which was the advisor's mobile phone.
Just two years after that robbery, in November 2017, a hard drive and two USB flash drives appear at Villarejo's home in which folders called DINA 2 and DINA 3 are stored, which contained files from the memory card. mini SD from the mobile phone stolen from Bousselham.
And the judge pointed out in his car that the files of one of the flash drives were copied on April 14, 2016 while those of the hard drive are a copy of the flash drive made in July 2016. As for how that information came into the hands of Villarejo, the The magistrate indicated that it is known that the content of Bousselham's card reached the journalists.