A 27-year-old avowed white supremacist, Holocaust denier and skinhead who said he used to be a Ku Klux Klan member was arrested on Nov. 1 before he could carry out a plot to bomb a synagogue in Colorado that day, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
The suspect has been identified as Richard Holzer. According to local reporting about the arrest, Holzer targeted Temple Emanuel in Pueblo, which is a couple of hours outside of Denver.
CBS4, citing court docs, reported that Holzer communicated with a undercover FBI employee on Facebook and sent her buttons with swastikas on them, while also telling her he was formerly affiliated with the KKK. What’s more, Holzer allegedly told a different person on Facebook that he wished “the holocaust really did happen […] they need to die.”
Fox 31 reported that Holzer “threatened to poison the water pipes at the Temple Emanuel Synagogue and use a Molotov cocktail to blow it up.”
Holzer’s contact with the undercover agent is said to have occurred on Sept. 28, a few weeks after which there was an in-person meeting in Colorado Springs. During that October 17 meeting with federal agents, Holzer allegedly expressed that he had considered blowing up the synagogue.
Holzer allegedly said on Oct. 13 that he planned to put arsenic in the synagogue’s water pipes on Oct. 31, just as he had paid a cook to do the year before. Oct. 31, 2018 was four days after a white supremacist, and avowed anti-Semite killed 11 Jewish worshippers in a mass shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh.
[Image via Scott Olson/Getty Image]
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