Former Army soldier sentenced to 45 years for role in plot to kill fellow service members

A previous United States Army soldier was sentenced to 45 years in jail for his function in outlining to eliminate fellow service members at a United States military base in Turkey.

Part of a neo-Nazi, pro-jihadist group referred to as the Order of the 9 Angles (O9A), Ethan Melzer, now 24, supplied delicate information about his system, consisting of places, security and troop motions, to the extremist group in connection with its plot to assault the base and eliminate his fellow soldiers, according to the Justice Department.

According to district attorneys, Melzer’s inspiration for the attack was to trigger a mass casualty occasion, causing another war in the Middle East and “eventually a race war to advance his objective of white supremacy” and the failure of Western civilization.

In June, Melzer pleaded guilty to tried murder of United States service members, supplying product assistance to terrorists and unlawfully transferring nationwide defense details. He had actually pleaded innocent in 2020 to charges that he was preparing a mass casualty attack on his own system by sending out delicate details to the extremist group.

” I’m sorry, and I are sorry for every thing I did,” he informed federal judge Gregory Woods throughout the plea hearing in 2015.

Members of O9A have actually embraced violent, neo-Nazi, antisemitic and hellish beliefs and have actually revealed adoration for Nazis, consisting of Adolf Hitler, and Islamic jihadists, consisting of Osama bin Laden, according to district attorneys.

According to Melzer’s defense lawyer, Jonathan Marvinny, Melzer found the O9A group online in early 2019– 3 months after he had actually gotten in the United States Army– and, after being “restricted to his barracks” in Italy throughout the pandemic, started “consuming greatly, and costs far excessive time online.”.

Prior to Melzer belonged to the OA9 group, he had an interest in “the occult” and signed up with online occult-related message boards, ultimately encountering the group, according to court files.

Strategies to assault his system gradually altered to assaulting a replacement system and after that to assaulting the delicate military setup itself, which Melzer discovered he would be appointed to protecting, court files state.

” As quickly as Melzer found out of his system’s upcoming release to a delicate area in the distance of jihadist forces, Melzer treasonously relied on prepare an attack on the really soldiers he was turned over to secure,” district attorneys composed in a sentencing memo. “He exposed extremely delicate– and mostly categorized– details to other O9A members and jihadists in order to murder his fellow soldiers in an ambush.”.

According to the Justice Department, Melzer shared the delicate details he learnt more about the base prior to release with O9A along with a supposed member of al Qaeda.

Marvinny composed in a letter to the judge that O9A was “distinctively incapable of performing any real-world action” which the leader of a sub-group Melzer signed up with was a 15-year-old Canadian young boy who pretended to be an ex-paratrooper online.

Melzer got the optimum, aggregated sentence for his charges.