The Supreme Court has agreed to annul, based on arbitrary and illogical reasons, the sentence of the National Court, of January 26, 2021, which acquitted the ETA member Asier Eceiza Ayerra of two attacks with explosive devices committed in two hotels in Alicante and Benidorm on July 22, 2003, which injured 14 people, 6 of them police officers.
It is the second time that the Criminal Chamber of the High Court revokes the resolution of the National Court against Eceiza in the same matter, since in November 2020 it annulled a first acquittal, issued on March 9, 2020 by the Court, when noticing omissions and deficits of rationality.
On the first occasion, the Supreme Court ordered the Court to hand down a new sentence to detail the assessment of whether or not the defendant was aware that the steps he carried out on behalf of ETA prior to the attacks were at the service of a campaign that probably included actions constituting havoc and attacks on the life or physical integrity of people.
After that first pronouncement of the TS, the National Court issued a new acquittal sentence where it added to the proven facts that it had not been proven that the defendant, when carrying out procedures such as reservations in the hotels where the attacks were committed a month before the same , or the rent on the same date of a house in Valencia that he occupied with the ETA member who planted the explosive devices, knew that ETA was planning to set off explosive devices in the aforementioned hotels.
The Supreme Court has estimated the appeals that the Prosecutor’s Office and the private prosecution filed against this second acquittal, and to preserve the conditions of objective impartiality, in view of its possible loss by the Court of Instance, due to previous decisions on the purpose of the process, agrees to hold a new oral trial and sentence handed down by magistrates other than those who previously saw the matter.
The sentence concludes that the response given in the sentence appealed to the mandate of the Supreme Court to justify the acquittal, assessing whether or not it was aware that the steps it carried out on behalf of ETA were at the service of a campaign that probably included constitutive actions of havoc and attacks on the life or physical integrity of people, has violated the right of the accusations to obtain a reasoned response. It adds that the new pronouncement must be considered arbitrary, unreasonable and incurs a patent error.
Among other points, the Supreme Court explains that it must be assumed that the defendant at the time of the events “was an active member of ETA and as such knew its purposes, objectives, methods and procedures, and among them, the so-called “summer campaigns” , that is, campaigns of attacks on hotels and tourist centers in the Spanish Levant, who moved from the Basque Country to Valencia together with another active member of the gang, both settling in a flat where different types of explosives were seized, 8 detonators and various materials to manufacture artifacts of this nature and in which up to 28 fingerprints of the aforementioned were obtained”.
For this reason, for the High Court, “it makes no sense to think that he was oblivious to the gang’s plans, to the activities that have been attributed to his partner (already convicted in the case) and specifically, to the attacks with explosives of the hotels… in Alicante and… in Benidorm, precisely the two in which Asier himself, with an assumed identity, had reserved rooms for the day of the attacks”.
“The mere hypothesis – the magistrates point out – of a command “displaced” outside the Basque Country, in the summer season, made up of two active members, in which one of them is completely ignorant of the objectives of the other is highly implausible, especially when they share the house and explosive materials and bomb-making tools are housed in it”.
“In the hypothesis -the sentence continues–, also unlikely, that it was a merely informative command, displaced in the summer period to gather information, precisely on the dates on which the attacks were carried out, the proven possession of explosive substances and the carrying out of specific attacks. Nor would it make sense and no explanation has been offered for the fact that Asier himself had reserved a room on the same dates in two different hotels -precisely the same ones that were the headquarters of the attacks – far from it, that he had proceeded to cancel both reservations the day before the attacks”.
And “it also makes no sense, with the same evidence and vestiges, to condemn one of the members of the command and acquit the other, even knowing that they were displaced together, living together in Valencia in the explosives storage place and the contribution certain part of the preparatory activity for the attacks, consisting of the reservation and subsequent cancellation of the rooms,” according to the court.
The sentence was handed down by a court made up of magistrates Manuel Marchena (president), Juan Ramón Berdugo (rapporteur), Antonio del Moral, Susana Polo and Ángel Luis Hurtado.
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