N.M. compound dwellers plead not guilty to terror
Five residents of a squalid New Mexico compound where a child was found dead last year pleaded not guilty on Thursday to terror charges that they were plotting to kill U.S. government officials, military personnel and FBI employees.
While federal authorities say the five family members were planning deadly attacks, their lawyers contend they were charged because they are Muslim.
The new charges are included in an indictment handed up earlier this month. The two men and three women — who have been incarcerated on weapons charges since August, after the authorities raided the compound — stand accused of running a terror training camp and using malnourished children, who lived on site, as pawns in their plot.
Their remote desert outpost near the Colorado border was used to store firearms and served as a base from which to prepare to “engage in jihad, to die as martyrs, and to engage in violent acts,” according to the recent indictment.
“The defendants in this case allegedly were preparing for deadly attacks and their targets included law enforcement and military personnel, the very people who are committed to protecting all of us,” Michael McGarrity, the assistant director of the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division, said in a statement.
But lawyers for the five said there was no terror plot and they were simply choosing to live off the grid, as many people do in New Mexico.
“We believe they would not have been charged with terrorism if they were not Muslim,” said Ryan Villa, a lawyer for Subhanah Wahhaj, one of the three women. “They were simply practicing their faith and exercising their right to freedom of religion and to keep and bear arms.”
Law enforcement officers raided the compound, which investigators described as a trailer buried in the ground and covered in plastic, after receiving a tip last summer, the authorities have said.
The missing toddler’s mother told the authorities that her estranged husband had abducted the boy after saying he was taking him to a park to perform an alternative healing ritual. The child had a condition that provoked seizures and prevented him from walking.
Law enforcement officials said they found 11 hungry children and a firing range at the compound, and the decomposing body of a 3-year-old boy, amid filth and stacked tires. The boy was in fact the missing child, Abdul Ghani-Wahhaj, the son of Siraj Ibn Wahhaj, one of the men now facing terror charges.
The severely ill child was denied medication before he died, according to the authorities, because the boy’s father believed it violated their beliefs.
Four defendants — Jany Leveille, Hujrah Wahhaj, Subhanah Wahhajand Lucas Morton — are facing kidnapping charges. As his father, Siraj Ibn Wahhaj cannot be charged with kidnapping.