[ad_1]
A partial report records what the Prosecutor’s Office has collected in the sim cards that they seized from the star witness in the Uribe case in January of last year. Responses from two key mobile operators are missing.
The Prosecutor’s Office continues after the information that could be in the simcards seized in prison from Juan Guillermo Monsalve, a witness who has pointed out an alleged role of former president Álvaro Uribe in the formation of paramilitary groups and who later warned of undue pressure from the ex-president and his lawyers retract. In a 23-page report, made known to El Espectador, the findings of CTI researchers who asked the country’s telephone companies for access to the data of the seven seized mobile cards are summarized.
(Read also: The prosecution’s time trial in the Uribe case)
As this newspaper reported, on February 17, a guarantee judge endorsed the request of the prosecutor in the Uribe case, Gabriel Jaimes, and gave the mobile phone companies five days to deliver all the information they might have about the sim cards . That same day, the Prosecutor’s Office asked Claro, Movistar, Tigo, Virgin, Etb, Avantel, Móvil Éxito and Uff, to report if the serial numbers of the cards that Inpec found Monsalve in January 2020 corresponded to their records. Already half of the operators responded and only one of them has information that could be of interest.
Monsalve was found, in addition to a laptop and a cell phone, two Movistar sim cards, two from Avantel, two from Tigo and one from Claro. But the Prosecutor’s Office did not even know what phone numbers they corresponded to, so they asked the eight telephone operators in Colombia this and asked them for the biographical data associated with the sims, as well as the records of text messages, voicemails and calls. that had been registered on the cards between January 1, 2017 and February 5, 2020. The dates are key.
(In context: Uribe case: judge authorizes extracting information from key witness SIM cards)
The facts for which Álvaro Uribe is being investigated would have occurred in February 2018. In those days the term was expiring to challenge a decision of the Supreme Court, which was inhibited from investigating Senator Iván Cepeda due to testimonies that he showed in the Congress of exparas that linked the leader of the Democratic Center with the Auc. Instead, the Court ordered that Uribe himself be investigated for alleged witness tampering. To dispute that last determination, lawyer Diego Cadena would have sought Monsalve and other witnesses to distract them from their allegations and entangle Senator del Polo, now accredited as a victim in the process.
The film of the Uribe case was extended to the following year, when the former president gave an investigation, and during the second semester of 2019 the witnesses cited by the then investigator, Judge César Reyes, paraded through the Court. The operation in which these prohibited elements were taken from Monsalve occurred on January 5, 2020, at the La Picota fiscal house, where he is being held as a security measure. Since then, the sim cards allegedly entered the chain of custody at Inpec, until the Prosecutor’s Office requested them at the end of last year, but now they want to know the movements of those cards during the first month they were seized.
(Also read: Juan Monsalve, witness in the Uribe case, accepted that objects seized by Inpec were his)
Regarding the content of the sims, Movistar is the only company that has been able to link the two cards of its company to two numbers that are registered as prepaid. In the first one, “no incoming and outgoing voice traffic information was recorded during the period requested by you,” as the company responded to the Prosecutor’s Office. In the case of the second line, there are calls for the period that the investigating body consulted and the company attached an extensive table to its response. He also gathered the data that says who bought the sim card.
Avantel responded that “the person who lists in his request does not register or has registered in our databases”; Éxito confirmed that none of the sims belongs to his company, and Uff’s liquidator informed the Prosecutor’s Office that the company ceased to exist since September last year. Although this is only a partial report, and the answers that Claro and Tigo can provide are lacking, the documents show that, in this line that the prosecutor Gabriel Jaimes has explored, little has been found: there is only information, to date , of one of the seven lines.
(Also read: Prosecutor’s Office investigates threats against Gabriel Jaimes, prosecutor in the Uribe case)
Although there is no consensus on the exact date, it is expected that next week the official appointed by the prosecutor Francisco Barbosa to take this case will decide whether to call a trial or request that the investigation against former President Álvaro Uribe be terminated. It is still pending, in addition, that the Supreme Court rules a protection of the defense of the ex-president who seeks to overthrow his status as a defendant, something that will be decisive. Meanwhile, the Prosecutor’s Office announced that Jaimes received threats against his life and Cepeda has publicly denounced that he does not feel that he is being given guarantees.
