Precedents of conviction and acquittal: what responsibilities may there be for the false threat in El Prat?
One man was acquitted for a message sent before boarding a flight in London, and another was convicted for a false bomb threat in Vitoria.
BarcelonaThe person responsible for the false bomb threat that caused an emergency landing at El Prat airport on Thursday has yet to be identified, nor have the potential consequences been clarified. However, legal experts consulted by ARA agree that the passenger could face charges for public disorder. Cases involving false bomb threats are not frequent, but in this state there has been at least one acquittal and one conviction in cases that, while not exactly the same, could serve as precedents for a potential legal proceeding regarding the events on the Turkish Airlines plane.
A message "on the way to blow up the plane"
On July 3, 2022, a young man born in India and holding British nationality was about to board a plane in London bound for Menorca when he sent a Snapchat message to a group chat with six friends. It read, in English: "On my way to blow up the plane (I am a member of the Taliban)." Security services intercepted the message as the plane flew over France, and the alert prompted the mobilization of a Spanish Air Force Eurofighter to listen to the message. Once on the ground, after searching the aircraft, they confirmed that the threat was not real: there were no explosives. Both the Public Prosecutor's Office and the State Attorney's Office requested that the young man be sentenced to 19 years in prison and fined €22,500 for public disorder. They also sought nearly €95,000 in compensation for the Ministry of Defense to cover the cost of deploying the aircraft, but the young man was ultimately acquitted.
The National Court determined that it could not be interpreted "even remotely" that he intended to mobilize the army or any other emergency team, which is the key element required for the criminal offense he was charged with. The ruling also took into account that the message had not been sent to any official body nor had it been disseminated beyond a private group.
The "lone wolf" of Vitoria
On April 4, 2015, a man called 112 in the Basque Country warning that a bomb was about to explode at the Vitoria bus station: "Hello, good day, this is the lone wolf. A device will explode at the new station in less than 15 minutes." This prompted a response from the Ertzaintza (Basque Police) and the Vitoria local police, although they found no suspicious objects at the station. A criminal court in Vitoria was scheduled to try him a year later, but the man accepted a plea bargain without a trial. Following an agreement with the Public Prosecutor's Office, he admitted the charges and accepted a seven-and-a-half-month prison sentence for public disorder with the aggravating circumstance of recidivism. (The sentence ranges from three months to one year in prison.)
In both cases cited, charges were filed for a specific type of public disorder offense under Article 561 of the Penal Code, which punishes "anyone who falsely claims or simulates a dangerous situation" and causes the activation of the police or rescue teams. The penalties range from three months to one year in prison, and the legal experts consulted agree that this is the type of offense that could apply to the false emergency on Turkish Airlines, although they also caution that details of the case, which have not yet been made public, would need to be examined.
Criminal lawyer Jorge Navarro, vice-dean of the Barcelona Bar Association (ICAB), clarifies that for such a conviction, the person sending the false alarm message must do so with that intention; therefore, a joke or a comment that the accused did not actually intend to make would not qualify. He adds that, in addition to potential criminal liability, the economic damages caused by the incident could be quantified, and the accused could be held responsible. For example, the cost of mobilizing emergency services. Pol Olivet, a lawyer and professor of criminal law at the University of Barcelona (UB), considers a conviction less likely, but agrees that the only applicable offense is that outlined in Article 561 of the Penal Code. Everything points to a passenger creating an internet network in Thursday's false alarm, whose name explicitly indicated a bomb threat, but Olivet—unlike Navarro—doubts that this can be considered active communication of the false warning. Olivet even suggests that no other passenger consulted the list of available internet networks, and therefore it's not the channel someone would choose to send an alert. "For me, the important thing is how the message was transmitted. We would need to know at what point the passenger gave that name to the network and with what intention," he argues.
