White supremacists held on riot charges
loS ANGeleS:
The leader of a Southern California white supremacist group and two other members were arrested on charges of inciting violence at California protests and at a deadly riot in Charlottesville, Virginia, last year, prosecutors said.
The arrests come weeks after other group members were indicted in Virginia on similar charges.
Rise Above Movement leader Robert Rundo was arrested Sunday at Los Angeles International Airport after returning to the US from Central America, US Attorney’s office spokesman Thom Mrozek said.
Two others, Robert Boman and Tyler Laube, were arrested on Wednesday morning, and Aaron Eason remains at large, Mrozek said. All four are charged with travelling to incite or participate in riots. Rundo, Boman and Laube were each denied bail in Los Angeles federal court on Wednesday.
Attorney information for the defendants could not immediately be found.
The men allegedly took actions with the “intent to incite, organise, promote, encourage, participate in, or carry on riots,” according to a complaint from the US Attorney’s office.
“RAM members violently attacked and assaulted counter- protesters” at events in Charlottesville and in the California cities of Huntington Beach, Berkeley and San Bernardino, an FBI affidavit accompanying the complaint said.
Prosecutors have described the Rise Above Movement as a militant white supremacist group that espouses anti-Semitic and other racist views and meets regularly to train in boxing and other fighting techniques.
According to the Anti-Defamation League, Rise Above Movement members believe they are fighting against a “modern world” corrupted by the “destructive cultural influ- ences” of liberals, Jews, Muslims and non-white immigrants.
Members refer to themselves as the mixed martial arts club of the “alt-right” fringe movement, a loose mix of neo-Nazis, white nationalists and other far-right extremists.
“They very much operate like a street-fighting club,” Oren Segal, director of the ADL’s Center on Extremism, said earlier this month.
The group has roots in the racist skinhead movement in Southern California, Segal said.
The latest arrests come just weeks after the indictments of four other California members of RAM for allegedly inciting the Virginia riot.