(US-wa) Trial begins Monday in firebombing at University of Washington
AnimalConcerns.org
May 21, 2001, but there's one place she wasn't: crouching in the
bushes near a research center at the University of Washington, serving
as a lookout for her fellow Earth Liberation Front activists as they
set firebombs that illuminated the night sky and caused millions of
dollars in damage.
Prosecutors say that's exactly where she was, and they are intent on
proving it during a trial that begins Monday at U.S. District Court in
Tacoma. Of more than a dozen environmental and animal-rights activists
arrested following a nine-year investigation into ecoterrorism in the
Northwest, only Waters, 32, has declined to plead guilty. She's taking
her chances before a jury because "she's not going to jail or prison
for something she did not do," her lawyer, Robert Bloom, said.
A violin teacher and mother of a 3-year-old daughter, she faces a
mandatory minimum of 35 years - more than twice as long as any of her
co-defendants - if convicted on all counts, including conspiracy to
commit arson, possession of an unregistered destructive device, and
arson.
"This trial will be the culmination of one of the Department of
Justice's most successful investigations in this district," said First
Assistant U.S. Attorney Mark Bartlett. He called Waters and her
co-defendants "a secretive cell of ecoterrorists who used arson to
impose their extremist views on society as a whole," and added, "That
group has been totally destroyed."
...
The UW fire caused $7 million in damage, and its notoriety ranked
second only to a 1998 arson that razed a mountaintop ski resort in
Vail, Colo. Investigators say those fires were among at least 17
perpetrated from 1996 to 2001 by members of an ELF and Animal
Liberation Front cell clustered around Eugene, Ore., and Olympia,
Wash., that called itself "the Family."
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full story:
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/6420ap_wst_ecoterror_trial.html
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