[ad_1]
A man who posed as a neo-Nazi has been jailed for threatening to bomb an NHS hospital at the height of the coronavirus pandemic.
Emil Apreda, a 33-year-old Italian man living in Berlin, threatened to place an explosive device in an unspecified English hospital unless he was paid £10m in Bitcoin.
His message purported to be from the neo-Nazi group Combat 18, but investigators said he used it as a “front for his extortion” and that he did not have access to a bomb.
Apreda emailed his threat to the NHS on 25 April 2020, but sent the same message to the National Crime Agency (NCA) control centre hours later.
Officials said they did not publicise the incident over fears that people would not seek hospital treatment because of safety concerns, and that Covid patients on ventilators would die if evacuated.
Nigel Leary, who led the NCA operation, said the threat evolved over the following six weeks.
“Our offender paid close attention to other world events that were going on at the time to try to increase our perception of that threat and elicit the response they were after,” he told a press conference.
“After the death of George Floyd, they changed the modus operandi and threatened to place a bomb at a protest in support of the Black Lives Matter campaign.”
Then ahead of the anniversary of the assassination of Labour MP Jo Cox, by a neo-Nazi in June 2016, Apreda started threatening MPs.
On Friday, he was convicted following a trial that started in December at Berlin’s Tiergarten District Court and jailed for three years.
Apreda was released on bail until the ruling is ratified, because under German law the verdict is not immediately binding and can be appealed within a week.
[ad_2]
Source link
