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- The FBI arrested four people in Los Angeles for a New Year's Eve bomb plot.
- They are members of the Turtle Island Liberation Front with anti-government views.
- The plot involved planting pipe bombs at five locations using encrypted messaging for coordination.
LOS ANGELES – The Justice Department on Monday said it has arrested four people in the Los Angeles area for allegedly working together on a bomb plot that was set to take place around the city on New Year's Eve.
The four people arrested – Audrey Ilene Carroll, Dante Garfield, Zachary Aaron Page and Tina Lai – were identified as members of the Turtle Island Liberation Front, which, according to the Justice Department and FBI, has an anti-government ideology.
A federal court complaint alleges that three members would plant "backpacks with IEDs at different points along their assigned buildings," adding that the "IEDs" would be "complex pipe bombs."
The plan also had outlined all of the security precautions the members should take while executing the plan, including using burner phones, de-clothing locations, and setting up long movies to stream at home to serve as an alibi, DOJ said. The documents also allegedly included a step-by-step process for crafting a pipe bomb.
"The subjects self-identified as members of a radical offshoot of the Turtle Island Liberation Front (TILF), an extremist group motivated by pro-Palestinian, anti-law-enforcement, and anti-government ideology. They were allegedly planning coordinated IED bombing attacks on New Year's Eve, targeting five separate locations across Los Angeles," FBI Director Kash Patel said in a statement on X.
The members planning to carry out the attack were using the encrypted messaging platform, Signal, the FBI alleges in the complaint. Carroll, the document says, "provided a list that identified components, chemicals, and tools along with prices which would be required to create the pipe bombs needed to go through with the planned attack."
The Signal group chat was titled "Order of the Black Lotus," according to the Justice Department.
On Dec. 12, the group allegedly went to the Mojave Desert to construct and test the explosive devices.
"Based on an FBI bomb technician's review of the materials found at the co-conspirators' campsite, the FBI bomb technician determined that the components could likely be used to build both (1) improvised explosive devices and (2) Molotov cocktail devices, and that the components were readily assemblable," the complaint says.
This story is breaking and will be updated.
