US evesdropped on 60 mn Spanish phone calls: Report

The National Security Agency (NSA) of the US evesdropped on over 60 million telephone calls in Spain between Dec 10, 2012 and Jan 8, 2013, according to allegations made Monday.

These allegations are based on the documents filtered by former CIA analyst Edward Snowden in an article published in Spanish newspaper El Mundo by journalist Glenn Greenwald, who wrote for the British newspaper The Guardian, Xinhua reported.

Greenwald was the journalist who helped publish the documents originally filtered by Snowden, which indicate that the NSA spied on the phone conversations of European leaders, among them German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

The document, entitled 'Spain last 30 days', reportedly mentioned the calls and although it did not give details of their contents, it did give details of the numbers used, the places the calls were made from and the durations of the conversations.

The espionage exercise also included intrusions into personal information through internet navigators which were used to access private e-mail accounts as well as accounts in the social networking sites, Twitter and Facebook.

This information can be hugely embarrassing to the US and its release coincides with a meeting between Spanish Foreign Minister Manuel Garcia Margallo and US Ambassador to Spain James Costos that was scheduled to discuss allegations of espionage.