• AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldBEnglish
    1·
    8 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    After months of planning, federal officials say, 18-year-old Alexander Scott Mercurio was just a few days away from executing an attack on American soil in the name of the Islamic State militant group.

    Mercurio detailed his plot to a man in a hotel, according to court documents: The Idaho teen said he would walk to a church from his home in Coeur d’Alene, kneecap churchgoers with a metal pipe, kill them with a knife, set off fires using small butane canisters and then try to wrestle a gun away from an officer once police arrived.

    “Thanks to the investigative efforts of the FBI, the defendant was taken into custody before he could act, and he is now charged with attempting to support ISIS’s mission of terror and violence,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a news release.

    He continued: “Perhaps it is a sign of insincerity that I prefer to carry out a successful attack to perhaps gain fame and notoriety … or that I fear the blame of the blamers and hate for them to slander me in the media, and call me a mentally ill psycho who did this out of desperation and delusion and not as an act of religiously motivated terrorism.”

    Mercurio wrote that he would send a video pledging allegiance to the Islamic State and delete his social media before he would “burn the temple to the ground and flee,” then “rinse and repeat for all 21+ churches in the town until killed.” He sent the 20-second statement on April 6 and was arrested the same day, authorities said.

    “The defendant allegedly pledged loyalty to ISIS and sought to attack people attending churches in Idaho, a truly horrific plan which was detected and thwarted,” FBI Director Christopher A. Wray said in a statement.

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