Americans Indicted in Plot to Carry Out Hate Crimes
Federal prosecutors have charged two Americans with operating a global terrorist collective seeking to commit hate crimes and murders.
Two Americans have been indicted on charges of conspiring to carry out various acts of terror as part of a transnational terrorist group that seeks to promote white supremacist ideology abroad.
The U.S. Department of Justice charged 37-year-old Matthew Allison, of Boise, Idaho, and 34-year-old Dallas Humber, of Elk Grove, California, on 15 charges.
These include one count of conspiracy, four counts of soliciting hate crimes, three counts of soliciting the murder of federal officials, three counts of doxing federal officials, one count of threatening communications, two counts of distributing bomb-making instructions, and one count of conspiring to provide material support to terrorists.
Federal prosecutors allege that Allison and Humber are the leaders of the Terrorgram Collective, a transnational terrorist group that operates on the digital messaging platform Telegram, which is immensely popular in Eastern Europe and within right-wing political circles in the United States.
The collective promotes “white supremacist accelerationism,” an ideology that claims the white race is superior; that society is irreparably corrupt and cannot be saved by political participation; and that violence and terrorism are necessary to ignite a race war that will lead to the collapse of government institutions, to be replaced by a white ethnostate.
Prosecutors allege that Humber and Allison operated Terrorgram channels and group chats, where they solicited users to commit attacks to achieve the group’s larger goals of accelerationism and white supremacy.
Specific attacks allegedly linked to the Terrorgram Collective are a mass shooting in which three people were shot, two fatally, outside an LGBT bar in Slovakia; a failed attack on energy facilities in New Jersey; and a mass stabbing incident that claimed the lives of five people outside a mosque in Turkey, in which the assailant live-streamed the attack.
Humber and Allison are also accused of compiling a hit list of “high-value targets” for assassination.
The list included various U.S. federal, state, and local officials, as well as leaders of private companies and non-governmental organizations, many of whom were targeted because of their race, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, or gender identity.
If convicted of all charges, Humber and Allison each face a maximum penalty of 220 years in prison.
“Today’s arrests are a warning that committing hate-fueled crimes in the darkest corners of the Internet will not hide you, and soliciting terrorist attacks from behind a screen will not protect you,” U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement. “The United States Department of Justice will find you, and we will hold you accountable.”
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