An Army private confessed to sharing secret information with a satanic neo-Nazi-group in a plot to attack his own unit while it was overseas and cause “the deaths of as many of his fellow service members as possible,” federal prosecutors in Manhattan said on Monday.
The private, Ethan Phelan Melzer, was charged in an indictment unsealed this week with collaborating with the Order of the Nine Angles, or O9A, a group that prosecutors described as “an occult-based neo-Nazi and racially motivated violent extremist group.”
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Private Melzer, Ms. Strauss added, had tried “to orchestrate a murderous ambush on his own unit by unlawfully revealing its location, strength and armaments to a neo-Nazi, anarchist, white supremacist group.”
The F.B.I. and the Army foiled the plot in late May before it could be carried out, prosecutors said, and Private Melzer, 22, of Louisville, Ky., was arrested on June 10.
While he was in custody, he declared himself to be “a traitor against the United States” and said his plan to stage an assault against an unidentified military base was “tantamount to treason,” prosecutors said.
Federal prosecutors said that O9A, which, like other extremist groups, often communicates via encrypted apps like Telegram, espoused “a diabolical cocktail of ideologies laced with hate and violence.”
Experts have said the group, which is based in Britain, overlaps to some degree with better-known neo-Nazi organizations like
the Base and
Atomwaffen, whose members have also been prosecuted by the federal government. O9A’s followers have expressed admiration not only for Hitler but also for Islamic terrorists like Osama bin Laden, prosecutors said.
It was unclear on Monday whether Private Melzer had a lawyer.