VIDEO - New York KKK member jailed after X-ray gun plans to kill Muslims | World | News | Daily Express
Glendon Scott Crawford, a self-confessed member of a white supremacist group, wanted to use the killer radiation device as a weapon of mass destruction against Muslims.
A Department of Justice (DOJ) investigation concluded that the 52-year-old was "an extremist" who wanted to kill Muslims while they slept with lethal doses of radiation.
FBI agents, whose undercover operation discovered the plot, said the mass murder plan would have worked if it had been carried out.
Mr Crawford and his co-conspirator Eric Feight were only caught out after they asked the KKK and Jewish synagogues if they would help fund the weapon.
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In their meetings with undercover agents, the pair said the "death ray gun" would blast Muslims, whom he labelled "medical waste".
If the plan was completed, the truck-mounted radiation particle weapon would aim a lethal beam of radioactivity near mosques, Islamic community centres and schools.
All those targeted would eventually die from radiation sickness within two weeks.
ABC
Crawford planned to kill Muslims on account of their religion
Department of Justice spokesman
The DOJ spokesman said: "His goal was to modify an industrial-grade X-ray radiation device and use it to cause death or injury by exposing people to lethal doses of ionizing radiation.
"Crawford planned to kill Muslims on account of their religion and other people whose political and social beliefs he disagreed with, including government officials."
Mr Crawford, who bought the radiation device from FBI agents posing as businessmen, was arrested last year during a DOJ raid.
While Mr Feight was sentenced to eight years in prison, Mr Crawford was sentenced to thirty years.
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CCTV
The mechanic from New York is the first person to be convicted under a 2004 law that makes it illegal to produce a radiological dispersal device.
The investigation began in 2012 when Mr Crawford visited a synagogue and "asked to speak with a person who might be willing to help him with a type of technology that could be used by Israel to defeat its enemies, specifically, by killing Israel's enemies while they slept".
According to the court reports, Mr Crawford also described the device's capabilities as "Hiroshima on a light switch" and that "everything with respiration would be dead by the morning".
Prosecutors wrote: "His plot to murder people he did not know was designed to, in his oft-repeated words, 'take his country back' from government leaders by forcing them to change government conduct he perceived as favouring Muslims."