A U.S. Army soldier stationed overseas has been charged with passing along information about his unit’s planned deployment overseas, intending it to get extremist groups to attack it.
Army Private Ethan Phelan Melzer, 22, of Louisville, Kentucky, faces a host of federal attempted murder charges, handed up Monday by a federal grand jury, that carry a maximum sentence of life in prison. John Demers, assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s national security division said Melzer “planned a deadly ambush on his fellow soldiers in the service of a diabolical cocktail of ideologies laced with hate and violence.”
Court documents said that beginning in April, Melzer began communicating on a restricted messaging application with followers of a violent, satanic neo-Nazi fringe group known as the Order of the Nine Angles.
A month later, the FBI said, he began posting information about his Army unit, stationed in Italy, and its planned redeployment to a U.S. military base in Turkey, in order to inspire a jihadist attack on the unit.
Article submitted by, KOB.
