Polish prosecutors find Pegasus data left the country and NSO kept a way in

Prime Minister Donald Tusk released a video statement on Monday 12 October saying the inquiry into the previous Law and Justice government’s use of Pegasus had established that data harvested in Polish operations was transmitted outside Poland, and that NSO Group retained technical access to material from operational surveillance. The conclusion rests on the National Prosecutor’s Office drawing on forensic experts from the ABW, the internal security agency. Tusk named four implicated bodies: the ABW, foreign intelligence, the Central Anti-Corruption Bureau and the justice ministry. He called the affair “one of the biggest scandals in Polish history since the fall of communism” and a “crime against the state,” and said separately that it was “beyond any doubt” that NSO cooperates with Israeli intelligence — an assertion of his own, not a prosecutorial finding. Haaretz reported the previous government paid $7.65 million for the system; The Media Line put the commission’s criminal referrals at eleven.

The distinction prosecutors drew, and which several outlets blurred, is between architecture and act. Investigators did not establish that NSO examined specific Polish operational material; they established that the system was built so that it could. Ernest Bejda, the former head of the CBA, publicly disputed Monday’s findings and denied that Israeli authorities obtained Polish surveillance data. PiS maintains Pegasus was deployed only with court approval against legitimate suspects. The procedural ground was already laid: former heads of internal security and military counterintelligence were charged in February 2026 over approving the system and both deny wrongdoing, and former justice minister Zbigniew Ziobro faces up to 25 years on abuse-of-power charges including the use of crime-victim funds to purchase the tool. Neither NSO Group nor the Israeli government had responded publicly as of 13 October.

Assessment: Watch the gap between “had access” and “used access,” because the eleven referrals may end up resting on the former. Prosecuting a vendor’s system design is legally far harder than prosecuting interception, and if the National Prosecutor’s Office cannot close that gap the headline finding becomes an architectural audit rather than a crime. Note also what Warsaw is doing rather than saying: The Media Line reports roughly $110 million in Israeli coastal-surveillance radars ordered recently, with the scandal running. Tusk’s claim about NSO’s relationship with Israeli intelligence is the live diplomatic charge — a NATO prime minister accusing an allied state from the Warsaw Security Forum stage. Silence from Jerusalem and from NSO is the next beat, and it has now lasted two days.