New York-The leader of a neo-Nazi group from Eastern Europe has been extradited to the United States of Moldova after his arrest last summer for allegedly instructing an undercover federal agent to be dressed as Santa Claus and delivers sweets poisoned to Jewish children and racial minorities, prosecutors said.
Michail Chkhikvishvili, a 21 -year -old from the Republic of Georgia, was prosecuted on Friday before a federal judge in Brooklyn in multiple serious crimes, including the request for hate crimes and acts of mass violence.
He declared himself innocent through a lawyer, Samuel Gregory, who requested that his client receive a psychiatric evaluation and be put in suicide surveillance while he was in custody. Gregory did not immediately return a message in search of comments.
The prosecutors described Chkhikvishvili, who also passes through the “Commander Butcher”, as the leader of the cult of manic murder, an international extremist group that adheres to a “neo -Nazi accelerational ideology and promotes violence and violent acts against racial minorities, the Jewish community and other groups that consider undesirable”. “
They said that the group’s violent requests, promoted through telegram channels and described a manifesto called “Hater’s Handbook”, seem to have inspired multiple real -life murders, including a shooting at school in Nashville, Tennessee, earlier this year who left a 16 -year -old student dead.
Since 2022, Chkhikvishvili has traveled multiple occasions to Brooklyn, where he boasted to overcome a Jewish old man and instructed others, mainly through text messages, to commit violent acts on behalf of the manic murder, according to the court documents.
When an undercover FBI agent approached in 2023, Chkhikvishvili recruited the official for a scheme that “involved an individual to disguise Santa Claus and deliver sweets with poison to minorities and racial children in Jewish schools in Brooklyn,” according to the Department of Justice.
He later suggested to reduce the focus to “dead Jewish children,” prosecutors said, after pointing out that “the Jews are literally everywhere” in Brooklyn.
When describing his desire to carry out an attack of massive victims, Chkhikvishvili said he saw the United States as “great potential because accessibility to firearms”, added that the undercover should consider addressing the homeless because the government would not mind “even if they die,” according to judicial documents.
He was arrested last July in Moldova, where he was retained until this week’s extradition.
In a statement, Attorney General Pam Bondi said that the case was “a marked reminder of the type of terrorism we face today: online networks that plan indescribable violence against children, families and the Jewish community in search of a depraved extremist ideology.”
