William Krar sentenced

William Krar will get eleven years in the pokey.

TYLER -- An itinerate gun dealer caught with a cache of poison gas, machine guns and other weapons in an East Texas storage facility was sentenced Tuesday to more than 11 years in federal prison.

But William J. Krar's motives, and those of his common-law wife, Judith Bruey, remain unknown to federal officials, who cast the case as a victory against domestic terrorism.

"To the extent there was any plot to use these weapons, that plot was thwarted," said U.S. Attorney Matthew Orwig of the Eastern District of Texas.

[...]

The case began to develop in January 2002, when a package of fake identification documents was mistakenly delivered to Staten Island, N.Y.

Federal agents traced it to a mailing center near Tyler, then to Bruey and Krar, who had moved to Noonan from New Hampshire in 2001.

In several storage sheds rented by the couple, agents found nearly half a million rounds of ammunition, blasting caps, pipe bombs, silencers, machine guns and more than 800 grams of almost pure sodium cyanide, enough to kill everyone in a one-story, 30,000-square-foot building within a minute.

"Anyone possessing that has to be considered very dangerous," [FBI Supervisory Special Agent Peter] Galbraith said.

I'm as glad as the next guy that a nutjob with a half million rounds of ammo and a bunch of explosives has been taken off the streets, but until and unless we get some kind of idea what Krar was doing with all that stuff and who he might have been doing it with, I'd call this a pretty qualified victory against domestic terrorism. Ammo and explosives are fungible; masterminds are not.

David Neiwert has followed this case closely from the beginning and has a lot of background info if you want to do some exploring.

Posted by Charles Kuffner on May 05, 2004 to Crime and Punishment | TrackBack