Two New York residents, one of them identified with the Ku Klux Klan, tried to sell to Jewish groups a deadly X-ray radiation device that one of them described as “Hiroshima on a light switch” and which he designed to zap people to death, according to the FBI, which unsealed its complaint in Albany on Wednesday.
The FBI charged Glendon Scott Crawford, 49, who is an industrial mechanic with General Electric in Schenectady, and alleged co-conspirator Eric J. Feight, 54, who works for an electronics company in Columbia County, with material support to terrorists, including use of a weapon of mass destruction.
Crawford told undercover FBI agents dujring a year-long investigation that he is “a member of the Ku Klux Klan, specifically, the United Northern & Southern Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.”
His device was designed to be mounted on a truck and remotely controlled with the capability of aiming a laser beam of radioactivity at people.
He searched for a source of radiation and found supposed a ready supplies who actually were FBI agents, working after apparent tip-offs from two Albany synagogues Crawford approached.
He approached one synagogue in April 2012 and “asked to speak with a person who might be willing to help him with a type of technology that could be used by Israel to defeat its enemies, specifically, by killing Israel’s enemies while they slept,” the FBI complaint says.
The “enemies” referred to by Crawford are Muslims and enemies of the United States to whom he referred as “medical waste.”
Crawford contacted a second Albany area synagogue the same day with a similar offer.
The FBI complaint states, “Crawford also told the (FBI source) that the target of his radiation emitting device would be the Muslim community. Crawford described the device’s capabilities as ‘Hiroshima on a light switch’ and that ‘everything with respiration would be dead by the morning.'”
He ended his meeting with the agent by stating, “How much sweeter could there be than a big stack of smelly bodies?”
The investigation advanced to the point that in December, the FBI requested and received a search warrant enabling agents to monitor Crawford’s and Feight’s cell phone calls, emails and text messages.
Crawford had successfully tested the remote triggering system, without a radiation supply, which could work from a little less than a half mile away from the weapon, according to the complaint. The suspects met in Albany on May 20 with the device in hand, and they planned to test it in a dry run out at a hotel, without a radiation system.
Crawford and Feight met again last Wednesday, when Crawford was to have been provided with an unfinished radiation system.
FBI agents, posing as South Carolina Ku Klux Klan members, who were interested in buying the device and financing the plot, arrested them on the spot.