![]() However, at no point in this trial was an expert brought in to analyze or even comment on the linguistic evidence relating to the accused, even though it started on 10 November, 2020, and ended on the following 27 May, therefore lasting more than six months. Thus, these allegations might exempt Houli from criminal liability. It should be noted that coercion and the use of substances are described as potential mitigating and exclusionary factors in Article 20 and 21 of the Spanish Criminal Code. Furthermore, he claimed that his contributions to the conversations in the recordings had been planned beforehand by the terrorists. In the first court hearings, Houli stated that he was coerced by the perpetrators into making these recordings and that he was under the influence of unknown substances when he did it. Mohamed Houli’s voice can be heard at different points throughout these videos. These recordings show three of the perpetrators (Younes Abouyaaqoub, Mohamed Hichamy and Youssef Aallaa) in the group’s headquarters, in Alcanar, as they work on explosives and threaten to use them against their enemies. Nearly four years after these events, on 27 May, 2021, three other men (Said ben Iazza, Driss Oukabir and Mohamed Houli Chemlal) were respectively sentenced to 8, 46 and 53 years in prison for offences including belonging to a terrorist group, possessing and manufacturing explosives in relation to their collaboration with the perpetrators of the attacks and the explosion of the group’s headquarters, an abandoned house in the town of Alcanar, some days before the events.Īmong the evidence weighted against the accused during the trial for the Barcelona and Cambrils attacks were linguistic data, such as messages exchanged by Driss Oukabir and his brother, one of the perpetrators, through social media platforms, as well as three video recordings taken on 14 August, 2017, (i.e., a few days before the attacks) by Mohamed Houli. Another one escaped and was killed by the police four days later in Subirats, a town located some 50 km away from Barcelona. ![]() Five terrorists were shot dead by police during the events. Taken as a single attack, it is the second deadliest by jihadist terrorists in Spain after the bombings in Madrid in 2004. A total of 16 pedestrians were killed and approximately 150 injured. In both locations, the vehicle-borne attacks were followed by melee attacks as some of the responsible individuals attempted to flee the scene on foot. ![]() On 17 and 18 August, 2017, jihadist Footnote 1 terror struck Barcelona and Cambrils (in the southern Catalan province of Tarragona) in the form of vehicle-ramming attacks. It is claimed that forensic linguistic analysis can generate valuable insights within terrorism-related legal proceedings. Second, that Houli makes key contributions to the unfolding of the interactions shown in the recordings and that he does so in a cooperative and apparently relaxed manner, which could at best provide only partial support to his allegations. Results show, first, that the exchanges analyzed present features indicative of both spontaneity and (limited) planification. The aim of this qualitative analysis is to test whether the linguistic evidence available supports the allegation that the participation in these recordings by one of the accused, Mohamed Houli Chemlal, had been planned by his interlocutors. ) model of pragmatic analysis, this paper examines three home-made recordings featuring some of the members of the terrorist cell responsible for the 2017 vehicle-ramming attacks in Barcelona and Cambrils weighted as evidence during the trial held between November 2020 and May 2021 in the Spanish National High Court. Drawing on Brown and Fraser’s (in: Giles, Scherer (eds) Social markers in speech, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 33–62, 1979) framework for the analysis of communicative situations and Fuentes Rodríguez’s (Lingüística pragmática y Análisis del discurso, Arco Libros, Madrid, 2000 in Estudios de Lingüística: Investigaciones lingüísticas en el siglo XXI, 2009.
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