Jewish Defense League Pleads Guilty To Conspiracy To Kill U.S. Congressman and Bomb Mosque
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Sunday February 02, 2003 08:11
by Bob Gilmanrosa
Los Angeles-AP (Jan 31, 2003)- A defense attorney says a Jewish Defense League member will plead guilty Tuesday to conspiring to bomb a Los Angeles-area mosque and the office of an Arab-American congressman.
His attorney says 60-year-old Earl Krugel will face ten to 20 years in prison under terms of a plea agreement. The lawyer says Krugel wanted to avoid a possible sentence of life without parole if he'd been convicted.
Krugel and the late J-D-L leader Irv Rubin were accused in 2001 of conspiring to bomb the King Fahd Mosque in Culver City and a field office of Congressman Darrell Issa (EYE'-suh).
Rubin died in November. Federal officials said he slashed his neck with a prison-issued razor blade then let himself fall over a detention-center railing 18 feet to the floor.
Comments (2 of 2)
Jump To Comment: 1 2So? Who cares? There's nutcases everywhere. Why clutter and degrade the newswire with court shit from LA?
If you can't be arsed to actually WRITE and CONTRIBUTE something, then the very least you can do is not clutter the newswire with irrelevant cut-and-paste jobs.
A Jewish extremist who plotted to blow up a mosque in California and the office of a US-Lebanese congressman has been killed in jail. Earl Krugel, 62, died after an assault on Friday at the federal prison in Phoenix, Arizona, the FBI said.
A spokesman said that a homicide investigation had been launched, without giving any further details.
Krugel - a Jewish Defence League member - was jailed for 20 years in September after admitting the plot charges.
Krugel's wife, Lola, said FBI investigators told her an inmate had struck her husband on the head from behind with a cement block, the AP news agency reported.
"Earl never saw it happening. He was exercising," she said.
Krugel was arrested in 2001 with another leader of the Jewish Defence League, Irv Rubin, who died in jail in an apparent suicide.
Bomb plot
FBI agents arrested Krugel and Rubin at their homes in November 2001.
Investigators seized bomb-making equipment they believed was destined to be used in an attack on the King Fahd mosque in Culver City, a suburb of Los Angeles.
The pair were charged in December 2001 with conspiring to bomb the mosque and send explosives to the offices of Congressman Darrell Issa, who is of Lebanese Christian descent.
Krugel pleaded guilty to conspiracy to violate the civil rights of worshippers at the mosque and to a weapons charge linked to the plot against the congressman.
In return, he was to escape trial on more serious charges related to the bomb conspiracy.
The plot was discovered before any blasts took place.
The Jewish Defence League was founded in 1968 by a far-right US rabbi, Meir Kahane, who advocated the expulsion of all Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Kahane was assassinated in New York in 1990.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/world/americas/4411408.stm
Published: 2005/11/06 05:38:26 GMT
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