Aditya Verma was 18 years old at the time of his arrest in Spain last year.
London:
A Spanish court has acquitted a British-Indian man of public disorder after he joked to friends about being a member of the Taliban and planning to blow up a flight from London’s Gatwick to Spain’s Menorca in 2022.
Aditya Verma admitted telling his friends in July 2022: “I’m going to blow up the plane. I’m a member of the Taliban.” However, he said he made the joke in a private Snapchat group and never intended to “cause a public crisis”, according to the BBC report.
A judge in Madrid ruled on Friday that “no explosives were found… that would lead one to believe there was a real threat”.
The judge at the trial held at the National Court in the Spanish capital on Monday – a year and a half after the incident – ruled that Mr Verma, of Orpington, Kent, should be cleared of any wrongdoing.
The message he sent to friends before boarding the plane was intercepted by British security services. They then passed it on to the Spanish authorities while the EasyJet aircraft was still in the air.
Two Spanish F-18 fighter jets were dispatched to accompany the plane. One followed the plane until it landed in Menorca, where the plane was searched.
Mr Verma, who was 18 at the time, was arrested and kept in a Spanish police cell for two days. He was later released on bail.
If he is found guilty, the university student will face a fine of up to 22,500 euros and an additional 95,000 euros to cover the cost of the jets.
An important question in the case was how the message got out despite Snapchat being an encrypted app.
One theory raised in the test was that it could have been intercepted through Gatwick’s Wi-Fi network. But an airport spokesperson told BBC News that its network “does not have that capacity”.
In the motion the judge said that the message, “for unknown reasons, was intercepted by England’s security system while the plane was flying in French airspace”.
This message was made “between the accused and his friends with whom he flew, in a completely private environment, through a private group to which only he had access. Therefore the accused had no idea Could…that the joke he made “may not be intercepted or traced by British services, nor by third parties other than his friends who received the messages,” the judgment said.
It was not immediately clear how UK authorities were alerted to the messages, with the judge saying “they were not the subject of evidence in this trial”.
A Snapchat spokesperson said the social media platform “will not comment on what happened in this individual case”.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
