By Ryan Barber
CALIFORNIA (WSJ, CONVERSEER) – The Justice Department said on Monday it had arrested four people on charges of plotting a coordinated string of bombings set to go off on New Year’s Eve across Southern California.
In court records, the Justice Department identified the four as members of the Turtle Island Liberation Front, an antigovernment group it said had advocated on social media for violence against U.S. officials. Federal agents arrested them on Friday in the Mojave Desert as they began preparing to build and detonate test explosive devices, law-enforcement officials said on Monday during a press conference in Los Angeles.
With the arrests, law-enforcement officials “prevented what would have been a massive and horrific terror plot,” Attorney General Pam Bond said on social media. She said the group also planned to target Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and vehicles.
In late November, one of the defendants allegedly provided a confidential Federal Bureau of Investigation source
with an eight-page document titled “Operation Midnight Sun” that contemplated planting backpacks loaded with explosives outside five locations targeting two companies and detonating them simultaneously on New Year’s Eve, according to court records.
Law-enforcement officials declined Monday to identify the two companies targeted in the alleged plot, with a top
Justice Department official describing them only as “Amazon-type” logistics centres.
The handwritten plan called for stuffing the backpacks with “complex pipe bombs” and included instructions for building them, along with guidance to avoid leaving behind evidence, according to court records. Among other steps, the plan instructed the use of burner phones, wearing gloves and keeping the hair of people involved tightly concealed to avoid leaving behind DNA, as well as keeping personal devices at home with long movies streaming to serve as an alibi, according to court records.
The document pinpointed New Year’s Eve as an opportune time for the bombings because “fireworks will be going off at this time so explosions will be less likely to be noticed as immediately as any normal day,” according to court filings. It also emphasised “absolutely no mistakes can be made.”
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At the meeting with the FBI’s confidential source, alleged Turtle Island Liberation Front member Audrey Carroll discussed the prospect of testing the explosives “in the desert” in mid-December, according to court records. Carroll and another alleged member of the group, Zachary Aaron Page, recruited others after the meeting, including Dante Gaffield and Tina Lai, according to an FBI agent’s sworn statement supporting charges against them.
The four discussed logistics for testing explosives over the encrypted messaging app Signal in a chat group called the “Order of the Black Lotus,” which Carroll described as a radical faction of the Turtle Island Liberation Front, according to court records.
On Friday, they were together in the Mojave Desert, where they unloaded bombmaking materials from their cars and began erecting a tent to keep them shaded from the sun, according to court records. When Carroll began to discuss grinding a precursor material for use in an explosive powder, FBI agents intervened and arrested the four before they could assemble a functional device, law-enforcement officials said.
Carroll, Page, Gaffield and Lai were charged with conspiracy and possession of an unregistered destructive device. A top federal prosecutor said on Monday that the Justice Department planned to file additional charges in the coming weeks.
