The Supreme Court has confirmed the sentences of the members of the terrorist organization that perpetrated the attacks in Barcelona and Cambrils on August 17, 2017 on Mohamed Houli (43 years old) and Driss Oukabir (36 years old) set by the National Court and endorses that the victims have been able to know the "truth" of what happened.
In this way, it rejects the appeals of the accusations that were intended to be made against the accused responsible for the 12 deaths in the attacks despite the fact that none of them participated in the attacks.
In a ruling handed down unanimously, it has partially accepted the appeal presented by the third convict, Said Ben Iazza, to whom the National Court sentenced an eight-year sentence as a collaborator of the organization. The Criminal Court partially upholds his appeal and reduces the sentence from 8 years to one and a half years considering that what he did - lending his documentation and a van to buy and transport explosive devices - was due to serious recklessness. .
Regarding the attempt of several accusations to hold the accused responsible for the completed and attempted crimes of terrorist murder, the Chamber explains that the National Court already expressly rejected it, and did so through a resolution "sufficiently motivated and against which, by decision of the legislator, no ordinary appeal can be filed.”
The court also rules out that the process followed violated the right to the truth invoked by any of the appellants by considering that the actions followed by investigation and subsequent prosecution, "due to their thoroughness, extent and jurisdictional control from the very beginning, have fulfilled, without ambiguities, with the protection standards derived from article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights where, by logical extension, the victims' invoked right to the truth is located.
Faced with the opinion of one of the appellants, the Chamber discards the conjecture that the imam of Ripoll who died in the Alcanar explosion one day before the attacks, Abdelbaky Es Satty is still alive, responding punctually to all the doubts suggested.
In this sense, the Chamber explains that "the facts declared proven are discredited (...) And it is done, furthermore, starting, it seems, from the idea that the process is an omniscient mechanism so that any shadow of uncertainty can only be interpreted as “product of a deliberate desire to conceal or not investigate, although, at the same time, it is not identified by whom,” the ruling states.
Regarding the failure to find the Es Satty telephone among the ruins of the Alcanar house and some of the conspiratorial telephone cards stolen by one of the actions, the court recalls that as a result of the explosion the bodies of the occupants of the building were left "absolutely destroyed", to the point that 14 kilos of human remains of the two deceased people were collected, as recorded in the minutes drawn up. "Which gives an idea of the exceptional intensity of the explosion and its destructive power," he adds.
"Consequently, it is much more plausible to consider, from the logic of reason, that the destruction caused prevented the location of the cards and the telephone than to hypothesize about the manipulation and collusion of all the TEDAX agents of the Cos de Mossos d' Squad that heroically put their lives at risk searching for evidence among the remains of the house,” it includes.
Regarding the doubts regarding Es Satty's body and the suspicion that he is alive because no relative of his has claimed him, the court points out that the reasons may be several. "There are many reasons that can explain it. The emotional one, to which the appealed sentence refers. Or the economic one, due to the impossibility of assuming the costly expenses of an international mortuary transfer. Or, even, the religious one that, on the contrary, they invoke the appellants to question what was established in the sentence. Because, in effect, Muslim funeral rites prohibit, based on the hadith of Abu Dawud, the embalming of the corpse and the extension of the burial time. And although exceptions to the prohibition, the formulas for embalming a body are also very demanding, and it is not possible to extract anything from the stomach or intestines of the dead because that would violate its sanctity, as specified in the hadith of Aisha," he emphasizes.
In this case, the Court does not know which specific human remains from Es Satty were buried in Spain and whether there are religious reasons for their non-repatriation as the rules governing burial according to Islamic tradition cannot be complied with.
And with regard to the suspicion expressed in the trial about the inaction or negligence of the State secret services in preventing the attacks, given the links maintained with Es Satty, leader or promoter of the terrorist cell, the The court warns that there is not a single reference in the case that points to this point.
It is stated that he was visited in prison, "without specifying dates and place", by secret service agents when he was admitted for a drug trafficking crime between 2010 and 2014 and that a leader of a Muslim community in Belgium stated that he had heard in 2016 Es Satty spoke in Spanish and when asked who he was speaking to, he replied that with the Spanish secret services.
The Chamber concludes that "it is obvious that such data, due to its generic nature, do not support a hypothesis of serious non-compliance with the duties of control of known sources of danger that may be required of the secret services entrusted with said function."
