Original article (in Serbian) was published on 17/11/2024; Author: Stefan Kosanović
The pro-government tabloid Srpski Telegraf has repeatedly written about the use of “Sky” messages as evidence in court, claiming that they are illegal. In these articles, it is also alleged that “the Supreme Court of Austria has rejected Sky” as admissible evidence in court and that this decision will apply to all legal proceedings in the country. However, the Public Prosecutor’s Office in Vienna, as well as the law firm that submitted the request to exclude “Sky” messages, have denied these claims to Raskrikavanje.
The “Sky” messaging app, which was primarily used by criminals, was almost a perfect solution for their secret communication.
It offered many security features – advanced app locking, encrypted message exchange, and the ability to remotely delete the entire content of conversations. Additionally, it could only be used on specialized phones that had the app pre-installed, making it impossible to simply download it from the internet.
However, the “dream app” came to an end in early 2021. Several European police agencies, led by Belgian, Dutch, and French investigators, managed to break into the “Sky Global” system and access its servers and a large number of criminals’ messages.
Following this, arrests of numerous criminal users of “Sky” began worldwide, as messages from this app revealed evidence that implicated them in various criminal activities.
Some of the most well-known court cases in Serbia using “Sky” messages as evidence include trials of the Belivuk group, Darko Saric, and the Vracar group.
All these cases are being followed by the editorial staff of KRIK, and we recently published that the company “Sky” hired Serbian criminals to sell phones for secret communication, with some of them earning millions of euros from this business.
Austria did not reject “Sky” messages as evidence
At the same time, there is an ongoing legal and media battle claiming that evidence obtained through “Sky” is illegal and cannot be used in court.
Thus, the tabloid Srpski Telegraf has recently published a series of articles claiming that “Sky” is potentially an unreliable piece of evidence obtained by intelligence agencies, with the narrative that “Sky is falling across the EU” in courts.
“Sky” allegedly loses credibility because defense lawyers in Europe cite the key issue in these cases as the challenge to the evidence, arguing that it was obtained illegally and is unreliable. They emphasize that messages from “Sky” were provided by foreign intelligence agencies who “eavesdropped” on foreign nationals and then allowed various prosecutor offices, including Serbia’s, to access this data.
In one of its articles, Srpski Telegraf states that the Supreme Court of Austria has already made a decision banning the use of evidence collected by foreign countries.
“According to the law firm Thorstensen&Frank, at its request, the Supreme Court of Austria (OGH) ruled on this legal issue. The firm published, and the media reported, that this is the first such ruling, and that it will be applied to all legal proceedings in the country”, says the article on the web portal Republika.
However, the law firm clarified to Raskrikavanje that this is not true.
“The Supreme Court is reviewing the use of ‘Sky’ message transcripts as evidence in Austrian criminal proceedings, but no ban has been imposed yet”, said Sven Rudolf Torstensen, the founder of the law firm, to Raskrikavanje.
In the case in which his law firm requested a review of how evidence from Sky communications was obtained, the Public Prosecutor’s Office in Vienna was responsible, and they also denied to Raskrikavanje that “Sky has fallen in Austria”.
“The Supreme Court (the highest instance for criminal cases in Austria) has so far rejected all objections to using Sky data. Only in one case, the prosecution was instructed to verify how the data was obtained”, explained the media service of the Public Prosecutor’s Office in Vienna.
Why do lawyers want to discredit “Sky” as evidence in court?
“If this was the case (if Sky was banned in Austria), all criminal proceedings would have to continue without using Sky messages as evidence. In the absence of other evidence, all criminal proceedings based solely on Sky messages would then have to be halted”, said lawyer Torstensen to Raskrikavanje.
Defense lawyers in Europe are attempting to challenge the evidence by presenting it as illegally obtained and potentially unreliable – provided by a foreign agency that “eavesdropped” on foreign nationals.
However, the police operation in which the data was obtained is complex and cannot be viewed as the action of just one country. In February and March 2021, several European law enforcement agencies, led by Belgian, Dutch, and French investigators, decrypted the Sky system by accessing its servers.
Prosecutors in Serbia, for example, received documents for the trial of Darko Saric for planning a murder and attempting to discredit cooperating witness Nebojsa Joksovic from France through an international legal assistance request.
Saric’s lawyers, citing a ruling from the European Court of Justice, asked for the ‘Sky’ messages to be excluded as evidence, although that ruling refers to the use of another encrypted communication app, “EncroChat”. The court panel decided that the Sky messages would still be used as evidence.
In fact, a series of articles published by Srpski Telegraf about Sky emerged at the end of October, shortly after KRIK published its article about the sellers of Sky phones in Serbia.
