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-Lurid Crime Tales-

Animal Agitators Convictions Upheld

2009-10-16

A U.S. appeals court upheld the convictions of animal-rights activists charged under a terrorism statute with using their Web site to incite threats and vandalism against a company that tests products on animals. The 2-1 decision was the first federal appellate court ruling on a constitutional challenge to the law. Six members of Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty were convicted at a 2006 trial in New Jersey of conspiracy to violate the 1992 Animal Enterprise Protection Act. The law, since revised, aimed to protect animal research laboratories from illegal, sometimes violent protests. The group was formed to protest the activities of Huntingdon Life Sciences in Franklin Township, N.J. The activists posted the home addresses of Huntingdon officials and contractors on the group's Web site, and harassment, vandalism and violence sometimes followed. In just one example raised at trial, Andrew Baker, chairman of a Huntingdon holding company, testified that protesters broke windows and threw smoke bombs into his Los Angeles home and also targeted a daughter's apartment in New York, plastering her door with pictures depicting his death. "While advocating violence that is not imminent and unlikely to occur is protected, speech that constitutes a 'true threat' is not," Judge Julio Fuentes wrote in the lengthy 3rd U.S. Circuit Court ruling issued Wednesday. The Stop Huntingdon group also endorsed "electronic civil disobedience", using technology to overwhelm company fax machines and computers. The campaign cost Huntingdon more than $400,000 in economic damage, the opinion said. "The record is rife with evidence that defendants were on notice that their activities put them at risk for prosecution, including the extensive use of various encryption devices and programs used to erase incriminating data from their computer hard drives," Fuentes wrote. The defense team will meet with clients to discuss whether to appeal the ruling, said Goldberger, who represents Joshua Harper of Seattle. Some of the other defendants were also convicted of interstate stalking. The group members were sentenced to up to six years in prison, and a few remain incarcerated. In addition to Harper, they include Darius Fullmer, Andrew Stepanian, Kevin Kjonaas, Lauren Gazzola and Jacob Conroy.

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Three Animal-Rights Activists Sentenced

2006-09-13

Lest we forget we have a few home-grown terrorists. TRENTON, N.J. (AP) - Three animal rights activists convicted of using their Web site to incite threats and harassment against a company that tests products on animals received prison sentences Tuesday ranging from four to six years. They were also ordered to pay a total of $1 million in restitution to the company and people they terrorized. All three said they would appeal. Three other members of Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty are awaiting sentencing within the next two weeks. Along with the organization itself, the six activists were convicted in March of using a Web site to incite threats, harassment and vandalism against Huntingdon Life Sciences, a company that tests drugs and household products on animals. The SHAC nuts have been especially active in Britain where they've worked out to put Huntingdon out of business, and have damn near succeeded. The government charged that the group waged a five-year campaign against the company, posting the names, addresses and phone numbers of Huntingdon employees and those who do business with the company, and personal information such as where they go to church and where their children attend school. Many of those people saw their homes vandalized and received threatening e-mails, faxes and phone calls. The group, based in Philadelphia, maintains its actions were protected under the First Amendment. Defense attorneys tried to portray their clients as well-meaning animal-lovers who committed a "crime of compassion." Creating a climiate of fear isn't protected speech and isn't compassionate. "None of it's fair," defendant Jacob Conroy, the Web site manager, whined said after the hearing. The defendants, all in their late 20s or early 30s, were not accused of directly making threats or carrying out vandalism. The three sentenced were the president of SHAC, Kevin Kjonaas of Minnesota; campaign coordinator Lauren Gazzola of Connecticut; and Conroy, of California. Kjonaas was sentenced to six years in prison, Gazzola to four years and four months, and Conroy to four years. Enjoy your stay in stir!

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US animal campaigners convicted

2006-03-03

good. A US jury has convicted an animal rights group and six of its members of inciting violence and terror against a UK firm involved in animal testing. The six from the Shac group were charged with offences against Huntingdon Life Sciences. They now face heavy fines and possible jail terms of up to five years. HLS was originally based in Cambridgeshire, but moved its main office to the US after a harrassment campaign by animal rights activists. The six members of Shac were found guilty by the federal jury in New Jersey after a three-week court case and three days of deliberation. Shac is an acronym for Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty, and for the last five years the Philadelphia-based group has targeted the group. Huntingdon Life Sciences now has its headquarters in New Jersey, but its main laboratories are in Cambridgeshire in Britain. Its employees have sometimes been victims of violent attacks as well as extreme ongoing intimidation. and it's about time we went after this group and ELF and their ilk. The company has also suffered financially and its listing on the New York Stock Exchange was put on hold after one of Shac's most recent campaigns. It is believed to be the first case under a new law enacted in 1992, known as the Animal Enterprise Protection Act.

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Daily Mail: (No Link) When animal rights terror gains the upper hand

2005-09-29

When terror gains the upper hand Daily Mail, September 29 2005 The targeting of children’s nurseries for attack by violent opponents of animal experiments signals a horrifying escalation in animal ‘rights’ terrorism. Gloating over the apparent impunity with which they are operating, the terrorists have boasted that they are ‘free to attack at will, whenever and wherever’. Dismayingly, such a claim seems to possess more than a grain of truth. Despite new laws against animal terrorism and the ever tougher rhetoric about new powers to tackle terrorism following the July bombings in London, violent extremists are successfully terrorising an ever widening range of people who may only have marginal connections with medical research that uses animals. Through an unremitting barrage of hate mail, harassment, assaults, arson attacks, hoax bombs, death threats and smear campaigns, a tiny group of terrorists has managed to bring universities and major pharmaceutical companies almost to their knees. Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS) has borne the brunt. But now targets include not merely its employees but staff and shareholders working for any institution associated with it. A family in Newchurch, Staffordshire, stopped breeding guinea pigs for medical research after six years of a hate campaign against them, which culminated in the desecration of the grave of the farmer's 82-year-old mother-in-law whose remains were dug up and removed. Innocent people are now in fear for their lives - simply because a small group of people have run rings for years around police and politicians who have seemed either paralysed by or indifferent to this utterly appalling state of affairs. The problem is not the absence of laws but the lack will to implement them. Yes, of course terrorism is difficult to tackle. But if the authorities were really determined to stop it, they could. Instead, the response at all levels of our society has been inconsistent and spineless. The police have been spectacularly ineffectual. A tiny group of fanatics forms the hard core prepared to carry out acts of terror. A wider circle of some 200 individuals carry out acts of intimidation. Many of these extremists, if not all, must be known to the police. Yet they refuse to act even when they are handed clear evidence. For example, an activist equipped with a long-lens camera was caught near the Staffordshire farm gathering information about movements on the property, apparently to pass on to those planning terrorist actions. Yet the police said there was no evidence that he had done anything wrong. Of course, there is a concern to allow free speech to those legitimately protesting against animal experiments. But it is simply beyond belief that the police cannot mount the infiltration and surveillance necessary to detect those who turn to violence and to bring them to justice. But then, who can have much faith that justice will hold the line against terror when - although some judges have granted exclusion zones around other targets - a few months ago a judge refused an application for an exclusion zone around Newchurch to protect its inhabitants from this terrorism. His refusal was based on the need to allow legitimate protest -- but such protests surely stop being legitimate when the views they express provide the justification for terror. Those who should know better have shown a distressing tendency to run for cover in the face of threats from the violent tendency. Earlier this month, the New York Stock Exchange postponed a planned listing of the parent company of HLS, minutes before the stock was due to start trading, after Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) listed contact details of Stock Exchange employees from board members to directors, economists and account managers. Rather than postponing the listing, the Americans should have prosecuted SHAC for intimidation. But there is nothing like a threat to profits to cause companies and governments to cave in to terror. Such short-term expediency, however, is storing up a long-term economic disaster. For pharmaceutical research, which is worth billions to the UK economy, will simply relocate to countries with fewer scruples about the human rights of protesters - and with far lower ethical standards about the welfare of research animals. There is surely an even deeper reason for the absence of political will to defeat animal terrorism. This is the strong streak of sentimentality that sets the inviolability of animals higher than the relief of human suffering -- even though most people now say they support the humane use of animals in medical research. This is surely why the police are so poorly resourced and why the Government so disgracefully removed Professor Colin Blakemore from the New Year’s Honours List, simply because he has fought a lonely and brave campaign against this terrorism and defended the humane use of animals in order to find treatments for disease. Unless a society transmits the firmest and most consistent message possible that it is united in its absolute determination to defeat such tactics, the terrorists will have the upper hand. Alas, we have given the opposite impression - and the threat to the lives of infants and their carers, along with countless other innocents, is now the grotesque result.

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FBI probing ALF

2005-04-29

The FBI is investigating claims by the radical Animal Liberation Front that some of its members had committed crimes against a pharmaceutical company - all aimed at pressuring the company to sever ties with a British firm it says mistreats animals during drug testing. The probe, involving a series of possible federal crimes by the underground organization, was confirmed Thursday by FBI spokesman James Margolin. Margolin said the investigation would examine a number of incidents over the past year that ALF claims its members committed against Forest Laboratories and some of its executives. The investigation was first reported in Thursday's editions of Newsday. Forest Laboratories is a Manhattan-based company with facilities in several Long Island communities. Forest, which has 3,000 employees, specializes in medicines for depression, anxiety, Alzheimer's and hypertension. ALF wants Forest to end ties with the British firm, Huntingdon Life Sciences, which it says kills animals in testing. A Huntingdon spokesman did not respond to a request for comment, but the company has said in the past it does not violate any laws in its experiments. Jerry Vlasak, who operates a Web site in California that posts "communiques" from ALF, confirmed Thursday that the group has made claims in recent weeks that some of its members followed a Forest executive's wife to her job, entered her car, stole a credit card and bought $20,000 in traveler's checks that it then donated to four charities. The woman, an employee at Stony Brook University, filed a report with campus police earlier this week saying that personal financial items were stolen from her car there. Vlasak, who stated that he is not an ALF member - although he supports many animal welfare initiatives - said the group has also claimed responsibility for vandalizing a Forest plant in Inwood, on Long Island, last June. It also claims it used a bullhorn at night for a week last October to harass a Forest Laboratories executive; glued the locks on the homes of other company executives in Nassau and Suffolk counties, and spray-painted their homes and cars with graffiti such as "puppy killer" and "murderer." A recent internal Homeland Security document lists the Animal Liberation Front among groups that could potentially support al-Qaida as domestic terrorism threats.

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FBI says fugitive had components in car

2003-10-12

An animal rights activist wanted on charges that he set off explosions at two Bay Area companies was in possession of components and ingredients to make bombs when he ditched federal agents tailing him. This is the first time authorities have disclosed the evidence they say links suspect Daniel Andreas San Diego to the recent predawn blasts. The bombings have drawn national attention during a summer of increasing attacks by animal rights activists and environmentalists. FBI agents continue to search for San Diego, a 25-year-old Sonoma man, who officials say, gave FBI agents the slip early last week as they followed his car to San Francisco, where they hoped to watch his activities. At the time, investigators had already issued an arrest warrant for San Diego and filed a complaint in federal court charging him with the Aug. 28 bombings of Chiron Corp., a biotechnology firm in Emeryville, and the Sept. 26 explosion at Shaklee Corp., a Pleasanton company that sells health, beauty and household products. Agents apparently wanted to monitor him before making an arrest. Which would be a good move... But by Oct. 6, San Diego had managed to escape the federal agents, abandoning his Honda Civic on a San Francisco street. Agents searched the car, finding chemicals and bomb parts consistent with the devices used in the attacks on Chiron and Shaklee, law enforcement sources told The Chronicle. Stupid on his part... Shortly after the bombings, a group calling itself Revolutionary Cells took blame for the blasts in an anonymous e-mail sent to followers of the animal rights movement. It said it targeted the two companies because of their ties to Huntingdon Life Sciences. The New Jersey research firm conducts drug and chemical experiments on animals for clients that Shaklee's parent company, Yamanouchi Consumer Inc., and Chiron. In the notes from Revolutionary Cells, descriptions were given of the explosives used in each case. Authorities say that the materials found in San Diego's car are similar. San Diego's father, the city manager of Belvedere in Marin County, and his mother have made a public plea for their son to contact San Francisco attorney Jim Collins and turn himself in. Pop's a city manager in Marin County, huh? Wonder where the kid picked up his politix?

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Animal activists lay claim to Shaklee bombing

2003-10-01

An animal rights group has claimed responsibility for a bombing last week outside the Pleasanton offices of Shaklee Corp., and has pledged to escalate its attacks if ties aren’t severed between Shaklee’s parent company and a laboratory that uses animals for product testing. "Today it is 10 lbs, tomorrow 20 ... until your buildings are nothing more than rubble," a group calling itself the Revolutionary Cells said in its statement. It was the second time in a month the Revolutionary Cells claimed responsibility for bombing a Bay Area company — part of the group’s campaign to stop businesses from associating with Huntingdon Life Sciences, an England-based laboratory that tests pharmaceuticals and chemicals using animals. The activist group has offices in Somerset, N.J. In a "communique" circulated among animal rights organizations late Monday night, the Revolutionary Cells says it left "an approximately 10-pound ammonium nitrate bomb strapped with nails outside Shaklee." That’s very palestinian of them. The Revolutionary Cells, thought to be an offshoot of the Animal Liberation Front, says it left the bomb — despite Shaklee’s animal-friendly policy — because Shaklee’s parent company, Yamanouchi Pharmaceuticals, continues to associate with Huntingdon. The statement also saved some of its most threatening language for Chiron Corp., the Emeryville biotechnology company whose headquarters was damaged by two bombs Aug. 28. Referring to Chiron’s board chairman by name, the statement said, "Hey Sean Lance, and the rest of the Chiron team, how are you sleeping? You never know when your house, your car even, might go boom." One word, Sean - bodyguards. As with the Chiron blasts a month earlier, nobody was hurt in the Shaklee explosion, which occurred shortly after 3 a.m. Friday. The bomb shattered glass and damaged a small piece of stucco at the base of the Shaklee headquarters on Willow Road in Pleasanton. Shaklee spokeswoman Jenifer Thompson referred all calls to the FBI. LaRae Quy, an FBI special agent, said Tuesday the agency has opened domestic terrorism investigations into both recent bombings, but hasn’t yet concluded the cases are linked. Why am I not suprised? Components of the bombs that exploded at Chiron and Shaklee have been sent for comparison to an FBI lab in the Washington, D.C., area, said Andrew Tarver, assistant special agent in charge of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ San Francisco division. Evidence from the two investigations will be compared with findings from other bombings nationwide, Tarver said. The investigations can take years. Besides the claim of responsibility, both cases have significant similarities, Tarver said. "If you look at the time and the place and the device, there was an overt attempt to minimize harm" by placing the bombs along exterior walls during late-night hours, Tarver said. So far, but don’t count on it staying that way. The incidents may mark a shift toward more violent forms of protest in the ongoing campaign to disrupt Huntingdon’s business. The animal rights group Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty says it does not advocate violence and was alarmed at the tone of the Revolutionary Cells’ claim. "We’ve never seen anything like it before," said Kevin Jonas, a SHAC spokesman in Philadelphia. "In the 25 years that the animal rights movement has had an illegal arm, there always seems to have been a guiding principle of nonviolence. This seems to break with that." Kevin, if you have nonviolent principles, why do you have a illegal arm?

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Bombs Explode at Biotech Company in California

2003-08-28

Two small bombs exploded and shattered windows early Thursday on the campus of biotechnology company Chiron Corp., but nobody was hurt and authorities said damage was minimal. While police and company officials declined to comment on any suspects, Chiron and its executives have been targeted by animal-rights protesters recently over the company’s relationship with Huntingdon Life Sciences, which conducts animal experiments. Since May, the activists have noisily protested at workers’ homes and vandalized an executive’s car. The usual suspects(tm)with the usual tactics. Chiron, based in Emeryville, has increased security and is working with law-enforcement authorities. The FBI and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives are assisting the bombing investigation. Emeryville Police Sgt. LaJuan Collier said the first bomb exploded before 3 a.m. in front of one Chiron building and the second detonated about an hour later at another building. Middle of the night when no one was around, they hoped. Chiron makes drugs and is required by the Food and Drug Administration to test its products for safety and effectiveness on animals before it can sell the drugs to people, company spokesman John Gallagher said. He would not comment on whether Chiron conducts animal research at the Emeryville campus. The company contracts with New Jersey-based Huntingdon for some animal research. Huntingdon has been the target of a four-year campaign waged by animal rights activists affiliated with a group called Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty. I vote we test new drugs on them. A spokesman for the group said he was unsure if the bombing Thursday was related to any animal rights protest. "But it looks like an action that we would support," spokesman Kevin Jonas said. I have no doubt that you do.

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