Madrid: A Spanish court has acquitted Aditya Verma, a British-Indian man who was charged with public disorder after he made a joke to friends about being a member of the Taliban and planning to blow up a flight from London to Spain's Menorca in 2022. Verma admitted to telling his friends, "On my way to blow up the plane. I'm a member of the Taliban."
However, Verma insisted he had made the joke in a private Snapchat group and never intended to "cause public distress", according to a report by BBC. A judge at the National Court in Madrid ruled that Verma, who belonged from Orpington in Kent, should be cleared of any wrongdoing, a year-and-a-half after the incident took place.
Verma's joke backfired on him
The message Verma sent to friends, before boarding the plane, went on to be picked up by UK security services. They then flagged it to Spanish authorities while the easyJet plane was still in the air. Two Spanish F-18 fighter jets were sent to flank the aircraft. One followed the plane until it landed at Menorca, where the plane was searched.
Verma was 18-years-old at the time. He was arrested and held in a Spanish police cell for two days, before being released on bail. He was questioned by British intelligence agencies MI5 and MI6 and was later sent home. If he had been found guilty, the university student faced a fine of up to 22,500 euros and a further 95,000 euros in expenses to cover the cost of the jets being scrambled.
Appearing in court on Monday, Verma said the message was "a joke in a private group setting". "It was just sent to my friends I was travelling with on the day... Since school, it's been a joke because of my features... It was just to make people laugh," he added. When asked what he thought when he saw the fighter jets flanking the plane, Verma said, "The Russia-Ukraine war was happening so I thought it was a military exercise related to [that] conflict."
Police experts told the court that they searched Verma's phone and although they found that he had researched clashes between Pakistan and India and the possibilities of an Islamic State attack in that area, they did not find anything of interest that linked the student to jihadist radicalism.
Information leak
An issue that sparked concern is how the message got out, considering Snapchat is an encrypted app. One theory, raised in the trial, was that it could have been intercepted via the Wi-Fi network in London's Gatwick airport, but a spokesperson for the airport told BBC News that its network "does not have that capability".
The judge in the resolution said that the message, "for unknown reasons, was captured by the security mechanisms of England when the plane was flying over French airspace". The message was made "in a strictly private environment between the accused and his friends with whom he flew, through a private group to which only they have access, so 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," the judgement added.
It was not immediately clear how UK authorities were alerted to the message, with the judge noting "they were not the subject of evidence in this trial". Snapchat declined to comment on the case.
(with PTI inputs)
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