Bomb Is Found in Backpack Before March Honoring King

[jamestolliver]

Via the The New York Times by William Yardley

SEATTLE — A suspicious backpack found Monday along the route of a march honoring the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in Spokane, Wash., contained a live bomb that was “likely capable of inflicting multiple casualties,” federal investigators said Tuesday.

The package, found before the morning march, prompted law enforcement to ask march officials to change their route and several businesses to evacuate as investigators sent in bomb-smelling dogs, a robot and specially trained officers.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation said the bomb was neutralized at the scene. It was found on a bench at North Washington Street and West Main Avenue.

“We’re certainly approaching it as a potential domestic terrorism event at this point,” said Frank Harrill, the F.B.I.’s supervisory senior resident agent in Spokane.

“Whether the motive was racial or an individual was being targeted, it’s too soon to say,” he said.

The device, partially concealed by clothing in a Swiss Army-brand backpack, was reported to police about 9:25 a.m. by a contract worker whose duties included helping to maintain a nearby parking lot, Mr. Harrill said. The worker apparently handled the bag and took photographs of it and sent the photographs to the police, Mr. Harrill said.

The F.B.I. is offering a $20,000 reward for information about the identity of anyone seen with the backpack. The agency is also seeking photographs or video taken in the area that morning.

The Rev. Percy Watkins, known as Happy, who read Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech at a gathering before the march that included city officials, American Indian leaders and others, said most people in the march did not know about the bomb threat, or that the march had been rerouted, until after the march.

[Jason California]

Oh Snap!

[Treacle]

[jamestolliver]

Yeah, the details surrounding this are pretty scary.

[bartleby]

I blame Sarah Palin and her "Martin Luther King, Jr was da bomb" tweets.

[Patch]

Ugh! The sick fucks are crawling out of the woodwork!

[BriRedfern]

Well thats not good. Good they found it and dismantled it, but not so good that it was there to begin with. Stupid people.

[The Dean]

Spokane?

I'd expect this kind of stuff somewhere else, you know, with less hippies.

[SteveFlack]

I'm just glad we've moved on from religious intolerance and are back to good old fashioned racism.

[bartleby]

Spokane?

I'd expect this kind of stuff somewhere else, you know, with less hippies.

The Spokane region and adjacent northern Idaho have had numerous incidents of anti-government and white supremacist activity during the past three decades.

The most visible was by the Aryan Nations, whose leader Richard Butler gathered racists and anti-Semites at his compound for two decades. Butler went bankrupt, lost the compound in a civil lawsuit in 2000 and died in 2004.

In 1996, white supremacists placed a pipe bomb outside City Hall in Spokane. The bomb exploded, blowing out a window and sending nails and screws across the street into Riverfront Park. There were no injuries. Two men arrested for the blast said it was part of a plot to spark a revolution and set up a whites-only nation.

In December, a man in Hayden, Idaho, built a snowman on his front lawn shaped like a member of the Ku Klux Klan holding a noose. The man knocked the pointy-headed snowman down after getting a visit from sheriff's deputies.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/htm...explosive.html