Feds: 2 plotted to build 'Hiroshima light switch' weapon

http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/06/19/19042422-feds-2-plotted-to-build-hiroshima-light-switch-weapon?lite

by Jonathan Dienst, usnews.nbcnews.com
June 19th 2013



NBC's Pete Williams reports on the arrest of the two suspects who allegedly tried to use a mobile radiation device.

Two upstate New York men, one of them said to be a member of the Ku Klux Klan, plotted to build a truck-mounted, industrial-strength X-ray weapon to kill “enemies of Israel” by poisoning them with radiation, federal authorities said Wednesday.

One of them boasted that he could build a “Hiroshima light switch” and that “everything with respiration would be dead by morning,” authorities said.

Investigators said the public was never in danger. The men scoped out Muslims and other groups as potential targets and apparently got as far as building a trigger for the device, but the FBI caught on, set up a sting and made sure the device didn’t work, the authorities said.

The men — Glendon Scott Crawford, 49, and Eric J. Feight, 54 — were charged with conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists.

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