The cell phone carried by Fernando André Sabag Montiel, the aggressor arrested for the attack against Vice President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, was blocked in one of the attempts to extract information by the security forces, so this fundamental evidence for the The investigation is at risk of being lost, judicial sources confirmed to Télam.
To explain the technical event, the two technicians from the Airport Security Police (PSA) were summoned to testify this Sunday, to whom the legend appeared that accounted for a possible formatting of the phone.
This was the case in a new attempt they made to extract information as part of the proceedings in the case of the attack suffered by the vice president last Thursday, hours after the device had been manipulated by technicians from the Argentine Federal Police (PFA), which was the first force to attempt to extract information.
Despite the inconvenience that keeps researchers on edge, from the court in charge of María Eugenia Capuchetti expressed confidence that the chain of custody was not violated and they claim to have all the documentary evidence that would account for it.
They do not know, however, the scope of the event, so they could not yet determine if the information can be recovered.
The phone had been seized when Sabag Montiel was arrested on Thursday night, after the attack on Fernández de Kirchner when he arrived at his home in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Recoleta: the aggressor carried it in the pocket of his jacket.
The phone was off and without battery. They placed it in a sealed envelope and took it to court.by order of the magistrate.
It turned on when they plugged it in for the first extraction attempt, and was immediately put into airplane mode so no one could remotely access the phone.
At the court, the extraction attempts began with PFA technical personnel and the use of a system called UFED, always in the presence of judicial personnel.
The two PFA technicians manipulated the phone and gave an account of the maneuvers to the secretary of the court, Federico Clerc.
When they assumed that the attempts failed, they prepared a report to record what had been done and the condition in which the phone was left in court custody in an open envelope and in the safe.
Hours later, the court received the news that the PSA had a more updated system that could try to extract the information and the device was taken there in a custody order and a court secretary.
In the PSA offices they tried again to extract the information and there arose the legend that realized that it had suffered a “factory reset”as revealed by the journalist of Página/12 Raúl Kollmann, and it was not possible to carry out the operation.
Under these conditions, the phone returned, always on and in airplane mode, to the court safe, in the same car in which it had been taken to the PSA headquarters in Ezeiza.
From there, two members of PSA were summoned to report on the event in a technical way, which will take place this Sunday.
In court they rule out that the phone could have been intruded remotely because it remained in airplane mode since it was kidnapped, so they suspect that the reset could have been caused by the multiplicity of attempts to access it.
The question remains as to whether the information was lost.
Nevertheless, there is information on the phone that the court has already accessed: it is that stored on the Sim card.
