The National Court has acquitted a young British man tried for sending on July 3, 2022, before boarding a flight from London to Menorca, a message to a private group of friends in which the British security services claimed he threatened to blow up the plane, which resulted in the immobilisation of an Air Force Eurofighter being sent to escort the aircraft.
Due to these events, the Prosecutor’s Office of the National Court and the State Attorney’s Office requested that the 19-year-old young man, a native of India and with a British passport, be sentenced to a fine of 22,500 euro for a crime of public disorder, as well as compensation for civil liability of 94,782 euro in favour of the Ministry of Defence for the cost of mobilising the military aircraft.
In his sentence, Judge José Manuel Fernández Prieto explains that the accused sent the message to a private Snapchat group that he had with six friends with whom he was traveling in which a photograph of himself appeared and a text in English that said: “on the way to fly the plane (I am a member of the Taliban).”
That message, the resolution relates, for unknown reasons, was captured by England’s security mechanisms when the plane was flying over French airspace, so the Spanish authorities were notified, and they deployed a Eurofighter plane that escorted the commercial flight to Menorca. Once on the ground, it was proven that the supposed threat was not real as no explosives or objects or instruments were found to confirm it.
For the central criminal judge, once the facts and the type of criminal offence attributed to him by the accusations have been analysed, his actions cannot be considered as constituting a crime. From the action of the accused, he points out, “an intention to provoke the mobilisation of the Air Force plane, or any other police, assistance or rescue service, is not revealed or even remotely inferred,” which is required by the legal precept of article 561 of the Criminal Code in its current wording.
“It cannot be ignored that the aforementioned message and the photograph are not sent to any official body, nor is it given any publicity, which would inevitably lead to the corresponding mobilisation of the pertinent police, assistance or rescue services, which is revealed as the most appropriate if the aim is to provoke the mobilisation of these services. 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 to which only they have access, so the accused could not even remotely assume (as expressly stated this at the trial), 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 receive the message,” he assures.
The judge states that it is unknown how the British services came to know about the photograph and message sent, as they were not the subject of evidence at the trial, although, he insists, the accused is not attributed an intention to mobilise 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 assures, “in addition to lacking all evidence, 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 and never by the accused.”
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