Hungrian prosecutor’s office launches investigation into Pegasus case

The Regional Proscutor’s Office of Investigations of Budapest has launched an investigation into the so-called Pegasus case under suspicion of illegally gathering information.

The investigation is aimed at ascertaining whether criminal activities have been committed, the National Proscutor’s Office of Investigations said in a statement on Thursday.

Foreign minister Szijjártó said the Orban government “has not monitored or wiretapped anyone illegally” since it came to power in 2010. No one was wiretapped just because they were “not friendly” with the government, he said today.

• Read more abour Pegasus spyware scandal

The “artificially stoked hysterics” around Pegasus “fits well into the international environment the Hungarian government has had to face in the past few days”, the prime minister’s chief of staff said on Thursday. No one was wiretapped because of their political views or because they are journalists, he said.

“We support the national security council in fulfilling its analytic tasks. We do not support scare-mongering,” Gulyás said. National security procedures are subject to rigorous control mechanisms, and the harvested data can only be used for the purposes defined by law, he noted.

The Hungarian security services collected data only in line with the relevant regulations, he said. The procedures will be reviewed by parliament’s national security committee, he added.

Referring to the opposition’s recent attempt to convene an extraordinary session of the committee, he said “the specific technology of data collection” did not warrant such a session.

Read alsoOrbán cabinet: the Pegasus case is an artificially stoked hysterics