A Kansas man was arrested today after trying to take what he thought was a bomb onto the tarmac of Wichita Mid-Continent Airport, federal prosecutors and the FBI said.
Terry Lee Loewen, a 58-year-old avionics technician from Wichita, planned to use his access card to conduct a suicide bombing at the airport, government officials said.
There was no danger to the public because the supposed explosives were inert and the man was accompanied by an undercover FBI employee, government officials said. Loewen had been under investigation by the FBI since earlier this year…
Loewen was charged in a criminal complaint with attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction against people and property, attempting to use an explosive to destroy property, and trying to provide material support to al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
No additional arrests are expected, federal officials said. Loewen would face as much as life in prison if convicted…
The complaint said Loewen left a letter dated Dec. 11 that said, “By the time you read this I will — if everything went as planned — have been martyred in the path of Allah.” It said he added, “I expect to be called a terrorist (which I am), a psychopath and a homicidal maniac.”
Federal officials said Loewen spent months preparing for an attack and communicating over the Internet with a person he didn’t realize was an FBI employee…
Loewen said he wanted to kill as many people as possible, and he explained where to park a vehicle full of explosives to accomplish that, the complaint said. He provided components to make a bomb and worked with a second undercover FBI employee to assemble it, it said.
Loewen was arrested today while trying to get into a security gate at the airport…
Idiot – most of all because of his commitment to terrorism as some sort of positive political tactic. It never has been. Hitler’s initiative dive-bombing the civilians of Madrid, LBJ and Nixon carpet-bombing Indo-China, jihadists murdering office workers in New York City, neo-Confederate racists lynching civil rights activists in the South – they all achieved nothing more than mustering the forces you would expect to band together against evil.
Idiot – because his reason for living became a monomaniacal focus on murder. Not the killing that accompanies war. The indiscriminate murder of civilians who most likely aren’t participants in any political conflict. Sectarian justification for wholesale murder.