Return to Top
|
- A Federal jury in Montana convicted four senior leaders of the Freemen anti-government movement of a huge banking conspiracy. The four: LeRoy Schweitzer, Daniel Petersen, Dale Jacobi and Russell Landers, and two other Freemen, Rodney O. Skurdal and Richard E. Clark, were also convicted a week earlier of other charges including threatening to kidnap and kill a Federal judge. (The New York Times, 7/9/98)
- Three men suspected of links to a Texas separatist group, Johnnie Wise, 72, Jack Grebe, 43 and Oliver Emigh, 63, were arrested and detained without bond on charges of conspiring to use weapons of mass destruction against Federal officials. The three allegedly planned to poison President Clinton, Attorney General Janet Reno, FBI Director Louis Freeh and other Federal and local officials with some kind of biological weapon. (The International Herald Tribune, 7/16/98)
- Militia activist Mark Koernke, 40, on the run as a state and Federal fugitive, was captured by investigators. After fleeing bail, Koernke had failed to show up for his May 1998 trial where he was facing a charge of threatening a process server with an assault rifle. In an affidavit filed in Federal court in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Koernke is accused of urging followers in a June radio broadcast to shoot Assistant U.S. Attorney Lloyd Meyer, a leading prosecutor of high-profile militia cases. (Ann Arbor News, 7/23/98)
- A Federal jury found Gazi Ibrahim Abu Mezer, 24, guilty of plotting to blow up a busy New York subway station with a pipe bomb. Mezer had testified that he had wanted to kill as many Jews as possible in a suicide attack. (AP, 7/24/98)
- The Justice Department, under the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, arrested and later released with an electronic tether Ford Motor Co. engineer Fawzi Mustapha Assi, 28, for his attempted delivery of high-tech military equipment -- night vision goggles, global positioning equipment and a thermal imaging camera -- to a representative of the Lebanon-based terrorist organization Hezbollah. The law bars providing material support to designated foreign terrorist organizations. At this writing, Assi has disappeared after failing to show up in U.S. District Court. (Detroit Free Press, 7/25/98)
- President Clinton imposed sanctions on seven Russian companies that Washington believes helped Iran develop its missile program. (Reuters, 7/28/98)
- A Federal judge has ordered the government of Iran to pay $65 million in civil damages for its role in the kidnapping of three Americans who were held hostage in Lebanon by Islamic extremists during the late 1980s. This case was the second lawsuit against Iran brought under 1996 legislation that permits U.S. citizens who are victims of terrorist acts abroad to sue foreign countries in American courts if those countries have been designated by the State Department as sponsors of terrorism. (The Washington Post, 8/28/98)
- Illinois white supremacist Wallace S. Weicherding, 64, was found guilty of conspiracy to possess and make illegal firearms and destruction devices and of possession of a machine gun. He was one of five men charged with plotting to start a race war through assassinations and bombings. His targets reportedly included the Anti-Defamation League in New York and the Southern Poverty Law Center in Alabama. (AP, 9/1/98)
- U.S. Fish and Wildlife officer Kelvin E. Smith, 43, who had provided paramilitary training to Islamic radicals linked to the World Trade Center bombing and other terrorist plots, has pleaded guilty to Federal charges of lying to the FBI and hiding evidence by dumping semiautomatic rifles in the Delaware River. (AP, 9/30/98)
|
