(Los Angeles) Four members of a radical left group were arrested in California and are accused of planning improvised explosive device attacks in Los Angeles for New Year’s Day, American judicial authorities announced Monday.
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These four people are charged with possession of a destructive device, according to prosecution documents.
“Over the weekend, the FBI thwarted an imminent criminal terrorist threat and arrested four individuals in the Los Angeles area,” FBI Director Kash Patel told X.
“They are suspected of planning coordinated attacks with improvised explosive devices for New Year’s Day targeting five separate sites across Los Angeles,” he added.
“The suspects presented themselves as members of a radical branch of the Turtle Island Liberation Front (TILF)”, an “extremist” group, said Mr. Patel, reporting a fifth arrest in New Orleans of a suspect who allegedly prepared “a separate attack”.
The Department of Justice and the FBI “prevented what would have been a massive and appalling terrorist project in the Central District of California,” Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote on X.
The suspects were planning “bomb attacks against multiple targets in California starting on New Year’s Day” but also against agents and vehicles of the immigration police (ICE), she continued.
They are identified in prosecution documents as Audrey Carroll, Zachary Page, Dante Gaffield and Tina Lai, the first two having shared a handwritten plan for the attack with a person who later turned out to be an informant paid by the FBI.
The plan consisted of placing backpacks containing improvised explosive devices in five different locations targeting two unidentified American companies, “to activate them simultaneously at midnight on New Year’s Day”, according to the same source.
But after having gone to the desert last week to test the explosives, the four suspects were arrested by the FBI without having been able to assemble working explosive devices, specifies the prosecution.
