Federal agents have broken up a plot to assassinate Democratic
presidential candidate Barack Obama and shoot or decapitate 102
black people in a Tennessee murder spree, the ATF said Monday.
Federal agents have broken up a plot to assassinate Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and shoot or decapitate 102 black people in a Tennessee murder spree, the ATF said Monday.
In court records unsealed Monday, federal agents said they disrupted plans to rob a gun store and target a predominantly African-American high school by two neo-Nazi skinheads, one of them from Arkansas. Agents said the skinheads did not identify the school by name.
Jim Cavanaugh, special agent in charge of the Nashville field office for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said the two men planned to shoot 88 black people and decapitate another 14. The numbers 88 and 14 are symbolic in the white supremacist community.
The men also sought to go on a national killing spree, with Obama as its final target, Cavanaugh told The Associated Press.
“They said that would be their last, final act – that they would attempt to kill Sen. Obama,” Cavanaugh said. “They didn’t believe they would be able to do it, but that they would get killed trying.”
The two arrested were identified in a news release from the U.S. attorney’s office in Tennessee as Daniel Cowart, 20, of Bells, Tenn., and Paul Schlesselman, 18, of Helena-West Helena, Ark.
