Nearly two decades after fleeing the United States, a Seattle man with ties to environmental extremist groups pleaded guilty in federal court last week to conspiring to burn commercial and state animal processing plants in Oregon and California, federal prosecutors said.
The man, Joseph Mahmoud Dibee, now 53, fled the country in 2005 and was first indicted by a federal grand jury in Oregon in 2006. Prosecutors said Mr. Dibee’s pending criminal case in Washington’s Western District was resolved by Thursday’s guilty plea.
Mr. Dibee conspired with at least 15 other members of the Earth Liberation Front and the Animal Liberation Front to damage commercial and government animal processing plants with improvised explosives made from ingredients such as fuel-filled milk jugs and model rocket detonators, according to court documents.
Members of the groups, referred to as family, have vowed to keep their identities a secret from law enforcement. They monitored locations they targeted and detonated time-delayed explosives to set off fires.
From 1995 to 2001, the family was connected to more than 40 felonies, totaling more than $45 million in damages, prosecutors said. One of the members’ most significant arson attacks occurred at the Vail Ski Resort in Oregon in October 1998, causing an estimated $26 million in damage, according to the FBI
The Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation Front were described in 2004 by John E. Lewis, then Deputy Assistant Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as “the most active criminal extremist element in the United States” and a “serious domestic terrorist threat.” .” Formed in Britain in the mid-1970s, the ALF used “violent tactics” and took “direct action” against individuals or organizations the group believed were abusing animals, Lewis said in a testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee at the time .
Court documents name Mr. Dibee as a participant in three attacks in three different states: the 1997 destruction of a meat packing plant in Redmond, Oregon; a 1998 fire at a US Department of Agriculture inspection facility in Olympia, Washington, which members said was part of the “great cleanup process” to end “this war on wildlife and nature”; and a 2001 attempt to burn down a state-owned facility used to remove feral horses from public lands near Litchfield, California.
In December 2005, Mr. Dibee fled the United States to avoid arrest pending federal indictments in Oregon, the Eastern District of California and the Western District of Washington following an FBI-led investigation into domestic terrorism, federal prosecutors said .
The FBI previously suspected that Mr Dibee may have fled to Syria. Thirteen years later, in the summer of 2018, he was arrested by local authorities in Cuba before boarding a plane bound for Russia and taken back to the United States.
“From destroying evidence to fleeing the country, none of Mr. Dibee’s tactics have stopped us from ensuring he is held accountable for his malicious and destructive actions,” said Kieran L. Ramsey, Special Counsel by the FBI in Oregon.
Mr Dibee, through his attorney Matthew Schindler, declined to comment.
In an interview with Oregon Public Broadcasting last year, Mr. Dibee questioned the government’s classification of his criminal charges as domestic terrorism.
“In most cases where the government charges terrorism, it actually doesn’t,” Mr Dibee told Oregon Public Broadcasting, adding that he was “more vulnerable” to the charge than an Arab living in America. In the interview, he also denied being involved in organized environmental groups.
“The reality is I’m an environmentalist and someone decided to say I’m part of an organization that doesn’t exist,” he said.
Prosecutors said Mr Dibee would pay his victims compensation – as determined by the government and ordered by the court – and that their recommended sentence was 87 months in federal prison. Mr Dibee will be sentenced by Judge Ann Aiken of the US District Court in Oregon in July.
Josephine Sunshine Overaker, one of Mr Dibee’s many co-conspirators, remains on the run, prosecutors said. Believed to have fled to Europe in late 2001, she faces 19 felonies in Oregon, Washington and Colorado.