FBI sting leads to arrest over truck bomb plot
UNITED STATES: A 23-year-old man who said he hated the US government has been arrested by the FBI for allegedly trying to blow up an Oklahoma City bank with what he thought was a 450kg bomb in a truck.
According to a criminal complaint, Jerry Drake Varnell wanted to start a militia group and admired Timothy McVeigh, the domestic terrorist who was convicted and executed for setting off a massive truck bomb outside a federal building in Oklahoma City in April 1995.
Varnell thought he was dealing with fellow sympathisers in the anti-government movement but they were an informant and an undercover FBI agent working in a sting operation, according to the complaint. Varnell was initially charged with attempting to use explosives to destroy a building in interstate commerce. If convicted, he would face a mandatory minimum sentence of five years.
The FBI complaint said Varnell initially said he was interested in targeting the Federal Reserve Bank building in Washington, DC.
‘‘I’m out for blood,’’ Varnell wrote to the informant, according to the complaint, saying he wanted to take action that would ‘‘somehow cripple the government.’’
Varnell said he had ‘‘III percent ideology,’’ a reference to a militia group called the Three Percenters, which believes the federal govern- ment is violating the US Constitution, the complaint says.
Raul Bujanda, the FBI agent in charge of the investigation, said there was no apparent link between Varnell and violence by neo-Nazis and other far-right extremists in Charlottesville. Bujanda said Varnell was not a member of any militia group, according to video of a news conference posted on NewsOK.Com.
The FBI has been monitoring Varnell since last December, the complaint said.
On Friday, Varnell helped the undercover agent build what he thought was a powerful bomb using ammonium nitrate and fuel oil, the materials McVeigh used in 1995 to kill 168 people. The next day, Varnell parked the truck next to a BancFirst building in downtown Oklahoma City.
Varnell also made several cellphone calls that he thought would trigger the blast, the complaint said. The truck and all of the materials, which were inert, were supplied by the FBI.
The FBI said Varnell wrote a statement that he wanted posted on social media after the explosion he expected. Varnell said it was ‘‘retaliation against the freedoms that have been taken away from the American people.’’
The public wasn’t at risk during the investigation, said Kathryn Peterson, special agent in charge of the FBI in Oklahoma.
- LA Times