Georgian man extradited to US to face charges over poison-candy terror plot
The leader of an eastern European neo-Nazi group has been extradited to the United States from Moldova following his arrest last summer for allegedly instructing an undercover federal agent to dress as Santa Claus and hand out poisoned candy to Jewish children and racial minorities, prosecutors said.
Michail Chkhikvishvili, a 21-year-old from the republic of Georgia, was arraigned on Friday before a federal judge in Brooklyn on multiple felonies, including soliciting hate crimes and acts of mass violence.
He pleaded not guilty through an attorney, Samuel Gregory, who requested his client receive a psychiatric evaluation and be placed on suicide watch while in custody. Gregory did not immediately return a message seeking comment.
Prosecutors described Chkhikvishvili, who also goes by 'Commander Butcher', as the leader of the Maniac Murder Cult, an international extremist group that adheres to a 'neo-Nazi accelerationist ideology and promotes violence and violent acts against racial minorities, the Jewish community and other groups it deems 'undesirables''.
They said the group's violent solicitations – promoted through Telegram channels and outlined a manifesto called the Hater's Handbook – appear to have inspired multiple real-life killings, including a school shooting in Nashville, Tennessee, earlier this year that left a 16-year-old student dead.
Since 2022, Chkhikvishvili has traveled on multiple occasions to Brooklyn, where he bragged about beating up an elderly Jewish man and instructed others, primarily through text messages, to commit violent acts on behalf of the Maniac Murder Cult, according to court papers.
When he was approached by an undercover FBI agent in 2023, Chkhikvishvili recruited the official in a scheme that 'involved an individual dressing up as Santa Claus and handing out candy laced with poison to racial minorities and children at Jewish schools in Brooklyn', according to the US justice department.
He later suggested narrowing the focus to 'dead Jewish kids', prosecutors said, after noting that 'Jews are literally everywhere' in Brooklyn.
Describing his desire to carry out a mass casualty attack, Chkhikvishvili said he saw the United States as 'big potential because accessibility to firearms', adding that the undercover agent should consider targeting homeless people because the government wouldn't care 'even if they die', according to court papers.
He was arrested last July in Moldova, where he was held before this week's extradition.
In a statement, the US attorney general, Pam Bondi, said the case was 'a stark reminder of the kind of terrorism we face today: online networks plotting unspeakable acts of violence against children, families, and the Jewish community in pursuit of a depraved, extremist ideology'.
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I find quiet there,' she added. She had sometimes confiscated her son's phone, she said, but 'the first thing that would be on TikTok when he opened it would be surfing'. Sign up to Headlines US Get the most important US headlines and highlights emailed direct to you every morning after newsletter promotion Last year, the state passed a law to prohibit the provision of addictive feeds to minors. But Rikki Davidoff, Rivera's attorney, says the efforts by social media companies has proved ineffective at curbing the spread of subway surfing videos. 'Your algorithm is your algorithm, right?' she says. 'It's still easy for a four-year-old to search subway surfing as it is for a 12-year-old. But one is far more impressionable for the other.' There are renewed efforts to hold New York's city authorities accountable. 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'We see the most vulnerable individuals affected most by the 1847 law, as you would expect.' Rivera's attorney has called on train operators to radio each other to slow down when they see surfers, and Rivera points to a failure by the public school system to crack down on truancy and failures by the MTA to make it harder to climb on top of trains. 'I don't think they're really done anything, to be honest,' she says before breaking off, sobbing.
