Aditya Verma was 18 years old when he was arrested in Spain last year.
London:
A Spanish court has sentenced a British-Indian man who joked to friends that he was a member of the Taliban and planned to blow up a plane from London’s Gatwick airport to the Spanish island of Menorca in 2022. A man was found not guilty on charges of disorderly conduct.
Aditya Verma admitted in July 2022 that he told friends, “I’m going to blow up a plane. I’m part of the Taliban.” However, she said he made the joke in a private Snapchat group and that she did not intend to “embarrass the public”, the BBC reported.
A Madrid judge ruled Friday that “no explosives were found that would lead us to believe that they posed a real threat.”
On Monday, a year and a half after the incident, the judges at the National Court of Justice in the Spanish capital ruled that Mr Verma, of Orpington, Kent, should be cleared of any wrongdoing. . .
Messages he sent to friends before boarding the plane continued to be picked up by British security officials. They then alerted Spanish authorities while the EasyJet plane was still in flight.
Two Spanish F-18 fighter jets were dispatched to flank the aircraft. One person followed the plane until it landed on the island of Menorca, where it was searched.
Verma, who was 18 at the time, was arrested and held in a Spanish police cell for two days. He was later released on bail.
If found guilty, the university student faced a fine of up to 22,500 euros and an additional 95,000 euros in costs to scramble the jet.
A key question in the case was how the messages were leaked, given that Snapchat is an encrypted app.
One of the theories put forward at trial was that it could have been intercepted via Gatwick’s Wi-Fi network. However, an airport spokesperson told BBC News that the airport’s network “doesn’t have that capability”.
In his ruling, the judge said the messages were “for unknown reasons intercepted by British security services while the plane was flying over French airspace.”
The messages were “conducted in a strictly private environment between the defendant and a friend who was on the plane with him, through a private group that only they had access to. The friends could not have inferred in the slightest that the joke they had made was such a joke, and that it could be intercepted or detected by the British authorities or by a third party other than the friend who received the message.” added.
It was not immediately clear how British authorities were alerted to the messages, with the judge saying: “They are not the subject of evidence in this trial.”
A Snapchat spokesperson said the social media platform “does not comment on what happened in this individual incident.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)