The National High Court orders to repeat the trial of the six acquitted for an alleged jihadist cell in Inca

PalmThe National Court has agreed to repeat the trial, with a different court, for six defendants accused of forming a jihadist cell in Inca, who were acquitted of alleged crimes of terrorist indoctrination and recruitment.

In the ruling, the Court of Appeal upholds the appeal of the Prosecutor's Office, which considered that the court that tried them had not valued the content of the telephone interceptions admitted as evidence. It should be recalled that the criminal chamber acquitted, last December, for whom the Prosecutor's Office sought to be sentenced to between 5 and 8 years in prison. One of them would be a Salafist preacher known for his videos on YouTube.

After the trial, the court found it proven that several of the accused recorded a fictional video with several chapters that they uploaded to social networks, but considered that viewing it did not allow them to conclude that it was indoctrination. The Prosecutor's Office indicated that the video was titled 'Toufik went to Syria' and where the considered leader of the cell, with the help of the other accused, showed the process of radicalization, recruitment, and sending to Syria of Toufik, a fictional young man residing in Palma.

According to the Public Prosecutor's Office, these facts could constitute a crime of indoctrination, as it is understood that their objective was to convince Muslims to join the Islamic State (DAESH) in Syria or to commit attacks in Western countries.

Analyze the intercepted conversations

The Court of Appeal now accepts the prosecutor's thesis and explains that the appealed sentence does not include any mention of the content of the intercepted conversations and the conclusions that could be drawn from them in a joint assessment of the evidence.

The magistrates insist that the law allows an acquittal verdict to be modified if all the evidence produced at the trial has not been assessed. "The omission in the trial court's sentence of even a minimal reference to the content of these conversations, favorable or unfavorable to the prosecution's theses, and without motivating the reasons why this assessment has not been carried out, constitutes an undeniable violation of the right to effective judicial protection that cannot be remedied in the second instance," it warns.

This implies the nullity of the trial court's sentence and the oral trial, with a new one to be held by a different court, given the "loss of impartiality" of the court that held the trial and issued the sentence, "undoubtedly conditioned by its previous ruling if a complete assessment of the evidence is to be carried out, which will affect above all the subjective aspects of the criminal offenses for which the accusation is formulated."

For the Court of Appeal, "this implies duly practicing and assessing the content of the conversations or duly justifying their non-assessment," in order to "establish the proven facts and proceed to the legal classification, taking into account all the elements of the criminal offenses for which the accusation is formulated, either to affirm their occurrence or to conclude that they do not exist."