The Animal Liberation Brigade (ALB), an apparent extreme animal rights cell, has claimed responsibility for the attempted firebombing of a vehicle belonging to the chief of pediatric ophthalmology at UCLA’s Jules Stein Eye Institute on June 24, 2007.
In its communiqué, released on June 28, 2007, by the North American Liberation Press Office (NAALPO), ALB, which has taken credit for two bombings in California in 2003, states that it placed and set off a one gallon incendiary device under the targets vehicle. Authorities, however, say the device was lit but did not ignite.
The eye doctor was apparently targeted for the animal experimentation that occurs in his laboratory. The communiqué, which includes the doctors’ address, warns: “you need to watch your back because next time you are in the operating room or walking to your office you just might be facing injections into your eyes like the primates, you sick twisted f--k.” The communiqué also contends that activists must realize that “just demonstrating won’t stop this kind of evil.”
The attempted firebombing is currently being investigated as an attempted terrorist attack by the Los Angeles Joint Terrorism Task Force, which is also looking into a possible connection between this incident and the attempted firebombing in June 2006 intended for Lynn Fairbanks, the director of the Center for Primate Neuroethology at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute. The Animal Liberation Front (ALF) claimed responsibility for that incident in which a “molotov cocktail” was placed on Fairbanks’ doorstep because of her involvement in animal experimentation. The incendiary device, however, was not left at Fairbanks’ home, but rather at a home owned by a 70-year-old woman, according to the FBI.
Extremists using the Animal Liberation Brigade and Revolutionary Cells moniker previously claimed responsibility for setting off two pipe bombs at Chiron, a biotechnology company with offices in Emeryville, California, in August 2003. Chiron was targeted for doing business with Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS), a British-based company that has been targeted by militant animal rights groups since the late 1990s for its use of animal testing. The bombs caused relatively minor damage, but a communiqué posted on the internet threatened, “You might be able to protect your buildings, but can you protect the homes of every employee?”
A month later, in September 2003, the Animal Liberation Brigade and Revolutionary Cells took responsibility for another bombing, this time at the offices of Shaklee Inc. in Pleasanton, California. Shaklee was targeted because its parent company, Yamanouchi Pharmaceutical, does business with HLS. An anonymous e-mail claiming responsibility for the incident said that activists had used a 10-pound ammonium nitrate bomb “strapped with nails.” Although the building sustained minimal damage, the e-mail warned that “we will now be doubling the size of every device we make” and that “customers and their families are considered legitimate targets….We gave all the customers the chance, the choice, to withdraw their business from HLS,” the e-mail said. “Now you all will have to reap what you have sown….You never know when your house, your car even, might go boom….Or maybe it will be a shot in the dark.”
In December 2003, the FBI announced a $50,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of fugitive Daniel Andreas San Diego, a 25 year-old Sonoma man who is the prime suspect in the Chiron and Shaklee bombings.
