National Court confirms Altsasu sentences

The Spanish National Court has upheld the sentences of up to thirteen years of imprisonment for all but one of the accused in the case of Altsasu (Navarra), agreeing with the original sentence that it was not a case of terrorism, as alleged by the prosecution. The events took place in October 2016, when a group of young men attacked two Civil Guard officers and their partners outside a bar. The prosecution had accused the young men of an act of terrorism, but the Appeals Court confirmed all of the original sentences with the exception of one, Iñaki Abad’s being reduced to ten years: three for the crime of attacking authority figures, two for injuries and one for public disorder.

Like the judges in the original trial held in Navarra, the National Court judges concluded that what happened in Altsasu cannot be considered a crime of terrorism. “This court assumes... that it cannot be concluded that the proven facts could be considered as acts of terrorism, nor that they were undertaken in relation to the ideology of the terrorist group ETA,” read the sentence. The judges also gave credence to the testimonies of the Civil Guards, since as evidence they were reasonable and “corroborated by another testimony, that of local police officers and the medical reports that demonstrate the injuries.”