Klansman Convicted Over Plot to Use "Death X-Ray" on Mosques
A professed Ku Klux Klansman became the first American to be convicted of federal radiation weapon charges on Friday when a jury found him guilty of plotting to kill Muslims with a modified X-ray machine, The Guardian reports.
According to prosecutors, 51-year-old Glendon Scott Crawford and an accomplice tried to create a weapon they described as “Hiroshima on a light switch” to expose Muslim communities to lethal doses of radiation. From NBC News:
According to the indictment, Crawford approached the Jewish Federation of Northeastern New York, Congregation Gates of Heaven in Schenectady and the Israeli Embassy in Washington to ask whether they would help him acquire a commercially available industrial-grade X-ray device to kill “enemies of Israel.”
They declined and reported him to the FBI, which sent in undercover agents in April 2012. The undercover agents provided the device, which they’d rendered inoperable, the FBI said.
Crawford and [co-conspirator Eric J.] Feight both worked for General Electric, and they managed to design, acquire parts for, build and test a remote trigger “that could have activated the radiation machine,” prosecutors said.
The Justice Department says Crawford even scouted specific mosques as targets of the weapon, allegedly telling an undercover agent “everything with respiration would be dead by the morning.”
Crawford now faces 25 years to life in prison for conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction, distributing information relating to weapons of mass destruction and attempting to produce and use a radiological dispersal device, which Congress made a crime in 2004.
His sentencing is scheduled for December 15.
