The National Court has acquitted a young man of the crime of public disorder of which he was accused of sending in 2022, before boarding a flight from London to Menorca, a message to his friends in which he joked about blowing up the plane. The message, sent to a private group on the Snapchat platform that he shared with six friends with whom he was traveling, was intercepted by the authorities and prompted an Army fighter jet to be mobilized to escort him to his destination. The Prosecutor's Office and the State Attorney's Office requested that the young man be sentenced to a fine of 22,500 euros for the aforementioned crime of public disorder caused by the false bomb threat and the payment of compensation of 94,782 euros to the Ministry of Defense for the cost of mobilizing the military aircraft, a Eurofighter.
In his sentence, the central criminal judge of the National Court, José Manuel Fernández Prieto, explains that on July 3, 2022, the accused Aditya Verma, 19 years old, a native of India and with a British passport, sent the message in which a photograph of him and a text in English that said: “On my way to fly the plane (I am a member of the Taliban).” The judge reports that the reasons why this private message was captured by the security mechanisms of the United Kingdom when the plane was flying over French airspace are not known, so the Spanish authorities were notified, who deployed a fighter that escorted the commercial flight to Menorca.
Once on land, it was proven that the supposed threat was not real as no explosives or objects or instruments were found to confirm it, he adds. For the judge, his actions cannot be considered as constituting a crime because “an intention to provoke the mobilization of the Army plane, or any other Police, assistance or rescue service, is not revealed or even remotely inferred.” And he adds that “the aforementioned message and the photograph are not sent to any official organization nor is it given any publicity” but rather “they are carried out in a strictly private environment, between the accused and his friends with whom he flies, through a group in which only they have access.”
The magistrate clarifies that “the accused could not even remotely assume that the joke he played on his friends could be intercepted or detected by the British services, nor by third parties other than his friends who received the message.” “Quite the contrary, they are carried out in a strictly private environment, between the accused and his friends with whom he flies, through a private group,” explains Fernández Prieto. The judge acknowledges that he does not know how the British services came to know about the photograph and message sent, as they were not the subject of evidence at the trial, but insists that the accused is not attributed an intention to mobilize the indicated services. The magistrate refers to the suggestion in the trial that perhaps it was one of the friends who revealed the message. Regarding this circumstance, he clarifies that “in any case in the public dissemination of the statement by a third party from the private group, the crime would be committed by this third party, never by the accused.”
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