Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn on Tuesday unsealed a sweeping felony indictment towards the 20-year-old they are saying is the pinnacle of a violent Jap European skinhead gang implicated in a variety of assaults and assaults overseas, a few of them deadly. The gang, identified asManiac Homicide Cult or MKY, is related to the com/764 pedophilia community, with at the very least one killing in Romania instantly related to MKY.
Michail Chkhikvishvili, in any other case generally known as “Commander Butcher,” “Michael,” and “Mishka,” was arrested on an Interpol warrant on July 6 in Chișinău, Moldova, for allegedly conspiring to solicit assaults on homeless individuals, Jews, and different racial minorities in New York Metropolis, distributing explosives-making directions, and making violent threats in on-line conversations with an undercover FBI worker. One plot prosecutors say he concocted with the undercover fed concerned poisoning Jewish kids by handing out tainted sweet whereas dressed as Santa Claus on New Yr’s Eve 2023.
Chkhikvishvili stays in custody in Moldova—which has beforehand collaborated with the US on the extradition of noncitizens—and has but to be extradited to the US and make his first look in courtroom. He has not been assigned an lawyer. If convicted, he faces a possible sentence of many years in an American jail.
The feds allege that Chkhikvishvili tried to incite the spy into extra assaults with both edged weapons or molotov cocktails and that he claimed that the deliberate assault can be a “bigger action than Breivik,” referring to Anders Breivik, the Norwegian neo-Nazi who killed 77 individuals in 2011.
Based on the FBI, MKY 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.” Very like different accelerationist militants such because the Atomwaffen Division and The Base, MKY seeks to destabilize society via violence and terrorism. It was based within the Ukrainian metropolis of Dnipro by Yegor Krasnov and is accused of many homicides and assaults in each Russia and Ukraine. Of their Telegram channels, MKY members lionized in-person violence and distributed how-to guides on committing violent assaults and shootings, inflicting most hurt to victims, and the way perpetrators might cowl their tracks. Committing and documenting such an assault is the standards for admittance to MKY.
Courtesy of Division of Justice
There are in depth ties between MKY and 764. That alliance was developed by Chkhikvishvili himself, notably via contact with two 764 members who glided by the handles of “Xor” and “Kush,” each of whom stay unidentified. “Tobbz,” a troubled younger German who killed an aged lady and stabbed a person in 2022, had additionally joined MKU, in line with reporting by Der Spiegel and Recorder.
The US Legal professional’s workplace for New York’s Jap District can be prosecuting two associated circumstances: the kid abuse and CSAM distribution case towards 764 member Angel Almeida, whose Fall 2021 arrest was the feds’ first glimpse into the world of com, 764, and MKY; and the case towards Nicholas Welker, the alleged former head of the neo-Nazi group Feuerkrieg Division, who was convicted in April for threatening a Brooklyn-based journalist. Based on courtroom information, Welker and Chkhikvishvili had been in touch from July 2022 to March 2023, when Welker was arrested and charged.
Chkhikvishvili, a Georgian nationwide, was current in the US in 2022, in line with an affidavit by FBI particular agent Erica Dobin of the New York Metropolis Joint Terrorism Activity Drive. US authorities say he visited his girlfriend in California in March and April of that yr, info the FBI realized after interviewing the younger lady about her virulent neo-Nazi social media posts. Shortly thereafter, Chkhikvishvili traveled to Brooklyn, the place he stayed along with his grandparents and labored in a rehab facility caring for an aged Orthodox Jewish affected person. “I’m working in rehab center privately in Jewish family,” he messaged one other neo-Nazi in July 2022. “I get paid to torture dying jew, I think I almost killed him today.” Chkhikvishvili despatched a number of pictures of the affected person to his fellow extremist. The affected person died later that yr, although the federal government doesn’t allege that Chkhikvishvili precipitated his demise.
It’s unclear when Chkhikvishvili left the US. Federal prosecutors give his place of residence as Tbilisi, Georgia, though he was arrested in a Balkan nation on the other facet of the Black Sea.
In allegedly urging the undercover fed to commit acts of violence and document them, Chkhikvishvili repeatedly emphasised the deadly stage of violence MKY members employed of their assaults, prosecutors say. “We murder they larp,” he allegedly wrote to a different extremist whereas evaluating MKY to a different neo-Nazi group, referring to “live action role play.” Even whereas allegedly planning the mass poisoning scheme with the undercover FBI agent, prosecutors say, Chkhikvishvili didn’t draw back from the potential “heat” the spy warned it could deliver on MKY: “That’s what we exactly want,” he wrote in reply.
