Belgian authorities are making progress with their investigation into suggestions the Catalan president in exile, Carles Puigdemont, was spied on in the country. They've discovered that the mobile phone which received the data from the GPS tracker on his car also received data from a further seven devices, Spanish newspaper El Periódico reports. Authorities have localised these other devices, which could be GPS trackers, microphones or phone bugs, and say they were used on Belgian territory. The SIM cards were from Spain.
Those spied on could be, besides Puigdemont, people close to him and the ministers in exile: Meritxell Serret, Toni Comín, Lluís Puig and Clara Ponsatí.
Sources with knowledge of the investigation quoted by the newspaper say that "the details discovered by studying the cards suggest to us we could be dealing with an espionage network against Mr Puigdemont and those around him in Belgium".
In February, Mossos d'Esquadra (Catalan police) officer Lluís Escolá found a tracking device stuck with electrical tape under Puigdemont's car. This sent geolocalisation data to a mobile phone.
In Belgium, espionage by other countries is a crime, even when those under surveillance are foreigners too.