SCRANTON, Pennsylvania—A U.S. man accused of plotting to blow up oil pipelines sought to bring down the Bush administration and expressed regret for the death of an al Qaeda leader, an FBI official said Tuesday.
Defendant Michael Curtis Reynolds wrote a series of e-mails to FBI agent Mark Seyler, who posed as an al Qaeda sympathizer and promised to give Reynolds $40,000 to blow up a refinery in Wyoming, Seyler told a federal court.
Reynolds, 49, from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, faces charges of planning to attack energy installations, trying to enlist al Qaeda members via the Internet, and possessing hand grenades.
The government accuses him of scheming to attack the Alaska and Transcontinental pipelines and other energy installations to prompt a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq.
Seyler described e-mails in which Reynolds, a divorced father of three who called himself "Fritz," said he wanted to blow up the Williams Refinery in Wyoming because he said it had lax security and was in a remote location that would enable the attackers to escape.
Reynolds wrote that his planned attack would help topple President Bush.
Security was of the utmost importance, Seyler told Reynolds in the e-mails during late November and early December 2005. "You will not cause us to reveal our secrets to the American agents," he wrote, in e-mails shown to the court.
In a message sent on Dec. 4, 2005, Reynolds referred to senior al Qaeda figure Hamza Rabia as a "beloved leader." Rabia was killed by security forces in Pakistan a few days earlier.
Reynolds was arrested on Dec. 5, 2005, at a remote rest stop in Idaho where he had been lured with the promise of cash for his operation.
Reynolds' purported plot was uncovered by Shannen Rossmiller, a former Montana magistrate who has been independently tracking extremists on the Internet since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Rossmiller told the court she had been deeply affected by Sept. 11, leading her to spend hours surfing the Web, often starting at 3:30 or 4 a.m. before her family awoke, using about 30 false identities to glean information.
"It impacted me pretty significantly," she told defense lawyer Joseph O'Brien. "It's an entirely different world now."
Rossmiller, 38, said she acted independently but referred many cases to the FBI.
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