Five members of a neo-Nazi group called the " Atomwaffen Division " were arrested on Wednesday in the United States for intimidation operations that notably targeted journalists, the Justice Ministry announced. Former group leader John Denton, 26, was arrested in Texas for coordinating malicious phone calls to move emergency response units to third parties.
Indicted in particular for " threat ", he had targeted between November 2018 and January 2019 a university, an African-American church and the home of a government official in Virginia, according to the federal prosecutor of this east coast state. John Denton had also moved police officers to the New York offices of the Propublica news site and to the home of one of his journalists, who he said was guilty of revealing his identity in articles devoted to his organization.
According to the Washington Post, he pretended to be the reporter and called the police claiming to be armed and to have killed his wife. Officers intervened urgently and briefly arrested the reporter and his wife. The neo-Nazi activist faces up to five years in prison for these so-called " swatting " false alerts (named after the Swat emergency response units).
Four other members of the Atomwaffen group, aged 20 to 24, were arrested for making threatening posters with Nazi symbols and Molotov cocktails, and for sending them to Jewish and color journalists and activists anti-racists, announced their side the services of the federal prosecutor of the State of Washington, in the northwest of the country.
" This is a warning to anyone who wants to use violence or intimidation to promote their ideology: the FBI remains committed to protecting Americans from internal terrorism ," said federal police official Jill Sandborn , cited in the press release.
Since the shootings in a supermarket in El Paso in Texas in August (22 dead, mostly Hispanic) and in a synoagogue in Pittsburg in November 2018 (11 dead), the FBI has multiplied operations in circles of the white far right radical.
