DOJ charges Georgian national with plot to murder minority children

A federal grand jury in Brooklyn on Tuesday indicted Michail Chkhikvishvili on four charges, including soliciting felony acts of violence in New York City. Prosecutors also charged him with distributing information about building explosive devices and communicating threatening messages over internet-based platforms.

The Justice Department alleges Chkhikvishvili was a leader of the international extremist group Maniacs Murder Cult. The group is largely based in Russia and Ukraine, according to court documents. It advocates for committing acts of violence against minorities and challenging governments and social orders through terrorism, according to the DOJ.

Authorities in Moldova arrested Chkhikvishvili under an international police warrant earlier this month. The allegations against Chkhikvishvili are merely allegations and he should be presumed innocent until proven guilty, the Justice Department said.

What exactly was Chkhikvishvili planning that got the DOJ involved? Chkhikvishvili exchanged messages with an undercover FBI agent he believed wanted to join the Maniacs Murder Cult, according to the indictment. Some of those messages pertained to a plan Chkhikvishvili devised for the undercover agent to make poisoned candy and then hand it out to minority children.

On New Year’s Eve, a Maniacs Murder Cult member would dress up as Santa Claus and hand out candy to minority and Jewish children, according to Chkhikvishvili’s alleged plan. Chkhikvishvili shared with the undercover informant an ISIS-linked manual for making ricin-based poisons along with a step-by-step plan for conducting the poisonings. If successful, the plan would be a bigger attack than Anders Behring Breivik’s bombing attack in Norway in 2011 that killed almost 80 people, Chkhikvishvili reportedly told the FBI agent.

How do explosive devices come into play? Chkhikvishvili routinely evangelized for the killing of minorities and homeless people in the United States, according to the indictment. To that end, he shared recommendations on different ways to make explosives such as Molotov cocktails with the undercover agent. Chkhikvishvili also shared an arson guide written in Russian with the agent, urging him to translate and read it.

Dig deeper: Read Bethel McGrew’s column in WORLD Opinions about how ideologies espoused by public figures such as Kanye West and Alex Jones aren’t just carnival acts.