Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

54 • ARSON1996, informed on the other group members and later hanged himselfin jail. Police arrested four group members, Pete Langaan, MarkThomas, Scott Stedeford, and Kevin McCarthy, who were convictedon robbery, conspiracy, and weapons charges in January 1997 and sentencedthe following month. With the arrest of Mike Brescia in 1997,all six members of the group had been apprehended.ARSON. Although most acts of arson are simply criminal acts in whichbuildings are burned for insurance fraud, personal animosity, randomvandalism, or pyromania, arson has been used nonetheless as a weaponby terrorists, whether in the form of arson of buildings or the throwingof firebombs at police, civilians, or property. In July 1998, after nineweeks of hunger strikes by 260 leftists in 33 Turkish prisons, in whichthree hunger strikers died, a wave of firebombings hit Turkish-ownedbusinesses and centers throughout Germany. German police believedthat leftist sympathizers among the two million expatriate Turks livingin Germany staged these attacks to pressure the Turkish government toimprove living conditions for their imprisoned comrades.In recent years in the United States, large numbers of churchburnings, particularly churches with predominantly African Americancongregations, have raised concerns that these arsons representhate crimes being perpetrated against racial minority groups, whichwould be a form of terrorist arson. On 10 October 1996 the UnitedStates Commission on Civil Rights stated that church burnings in thesouthern United States reflected an “alarming rise in racial tensionsin society.” A few incidents seemed to confirm this view: on 10 December1996, two former Ku Klux Klan (KKK) members pleadedguilty to charges of having burned the Macedonia Baptist Church inSouth Carolina in June 1995 in addition to the Mount Zion AfricanMethodist Episcopal Church in Greeleyville, S.C., in June 1995.However, Deval L. Patrick, the assistant attorney general for civilrights, now governor of Massachusetts, testified before the U.S. HouseJudiciary Committee on 21 May 1996 that although racism appeared tobe a motive in many of the church fires, there was no evidence of anyorganized regional or nationwide conspiracy behind these burnings.Since January 1995 the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms(ATF) had investigated 2,600 fires. On 7 June 1996 the ATF reportindicated that five black churches in the south were burned in 1995and 20 in 1996, out of a total of 47 church fires since 1 January 1995.