A Jewish Defense League activist imprisoned for his role in a plot to bomb a California mosque and the office of a Lebanese-American US congressman was killed at a federal prison in Phoenix, an FBI spokesman said on Saturday.
Earl Krugel, 62, was killed in an assault on Friday evening at the Federal Correctional Institution, said FBI agent Richard Murray.
Murray wouldn't release further details but said federal authorities had opened a homicide investigation.
Krugel's wife, Lola, said FBI investigators told her an inmate had struck her husband on the head from behind with a cement block.
"Earl never saw it happening," she said. "He was exercising."
He had been at the medium-security prison for three days, according to his sister Linda Krugel, also of Los Angeles.
Earl Krugel, a former dental assistant from Los Angeles, and late JDL leader Irv Rubin were arrested in 2001 and charged with conspiring to bomb the King Fahd Mosque in Culver City and a field office of Republican Republican Darrell Issa, who is Lebanese-American.
Krugel pleaded guilty in 2003 to one count of conspiracy to violate the civil rights of worshippers at the mosque and one count of carrying an explosive device in connection with a conspiracy to impede or injure an office of the US.
Despite the plea, he was sentenced in September to 20 years in prison. The reasons for the collapse of an initial plea agreement were sealed, despite a lawsuit by news organizations to make the details public.
During the case, Krugel's lawyers said prosecutors were angered that his client withheld for several months the names of four people allegedly connected to the 1985 murder case of Alex Odeh, a regional director of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. Several former JDL members were suspected in the case, but no one was ever charged.
"Earl did not deserve what he got," Krugel's wife said Saturday. "It was all political. It was all about Alex Odeh and my husband did not know anything about Alex Odeh. I'm devastated and I'm shocked that the system allowed this to happen."
TIT-FOR-TAT: The arrest of Filipinos that Manila said were in China as part of a scholarship program follows the Philippines’ detention of at least a dozen Chinese The Philippines yesterday expressed alarm over the arrest of three Filipinos in China on suspicion of espionage, saying they were ordinary citizens and the arrests could be retaliation for Manila’s crackdown against alleged Chinese spies. Chinese authorities arrested the Filipinos and accused them of working for the Philippine National Security Council to gather classified information on its military, the state-run China Daily reported earlier this week, citing state security officials. It said the three had confessed to the crime. The National Security Council disputed Beijing’s accusations, saying the three were former recipients of a government scholarship program created under an agreement between the
Sitting around a wrestling ring, churchgoers roared as local hero Billy O’Keeffe body-slammed a fighter named Disciple. Beneath stained-glass windows, they whooped and cheered as burly, tattooed wresters tumbled into the aisle during a six-man tag-team battle. This is Wrestling Church, which brings blood, sweat and tears — mostly sweat — to St Peter’s Anglican church in the northern England town of Shipley. It is the creation of Gareth Thompson, a charismatic 37-year-old who said he was saved by pro wrestling and Jesus — and wants others to have the same experience. The outsized characters and scripted morality battles of pro wrestling fit
ACCESS DISPUTE: The blast struck a house, and set cars and tractors alight, with the fires wrecking several other structures and cutting electricity An explosion killed at least five people, including a pregnant woman and a one-year-old, during a standoff between rival groups of gold miners early on Thursday in northwestern Bolivia, police said, a rare instance of a territorial dispute between the nation’s mining cooperatives turning fatal. The blast thundered through the Yani mining camp as two rival mining groups disputed access to the gold mine near the mountain town of Sorata, about 150km northwest of the country’s administrative capital of La Paz, said Colonel Gunther Agudo, a local police officer. Several gold deposits straddle the remote area. Agudo had initially reported six people killed,
SUSPICION: Junta leader Min Aung Hlaing returned to protests after attending a summit at which he promised to hold ‘free and fair’ elections, which critics derided as a sham The death toll from a major earthquake in Myanmar has risen to more than 3,300, state media said yesterday, as the UN aid chief made a renewed call for the world to help the disaster-struck nation. The quake on Friday last week flattened buildings and destroyed infrastructure across the country, resulting in 3,354 deaths and 4,508 people injured, with 220 others missing, new figures published by state media showed. More than one week after the disaster, many people in the country are still without shelter, either forced to sleep outdoors because their homes were destroyed or wary of further collapses. A UN estimate
RSS