Michail Chkhikvishvili, a Georgian national with neo-Nazi ties and whose aliases include “Commander Butcher,” was indicted for soliciting hate crimes and acts of mass violence, per a federal grand jury indictment on Monday.
The 20-year-old alleged leader of the Maniac Murder Cult was arrested in Moldova on July 6 and indicted in Brooklyn, N.Y. (He had spent time in New York.)
“As alleged, the defendant sought to recruit others to commit violent attacks and killings in furtherance of his Neo-Nazi ideologies,” stated Breon Peace, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York. “His goal was to spread hatred, fear and destruction by encouraging bombings, arson and even poisoning children, for the purpose of harming racial minorities, the Jewish community and homeless individuals.”
According to the indictment, Chkhikvishvili started in November 2023 to plan a major attack in New York City on New Year’s Eve.
“The scheme involved an individual dressing up as Santa Claus and handing out candy laced with poison to racial minorities,” the Justice Department stated. “The scheme also involved providing candy laced with poison to children at Jewish schools in Brooklyn.”
On or around Jan. 9, Chkhikvishvili wrote to an FBI informant posing as a recruit for Chkhikvishvili’s hate group that “Jews are literally everywhere,” and that the would-be recruit should attack on “some Jewish holiday” at “Jewish schools full of kids,” per the indictment.
“Dead Jewish kids,” he also wrote, per the complaint. He added that after publicizing a video of the attack on Jewish kids, his hate group “will become bigger than Al Qaeda once it drops.”
The accused told the undercover agent how to make “ricin-based poisons in powder and liquid form, including by extracting ricin from castor beans,” per the Justice Department. “Some of the materials transmitted by Chkhikvishvili have been linked to radical Islamist jihadist groups and designated foreign terrorist organizations, such as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.”
On or around July 11, 2002, Chkhikvishvili bragged in a message “that he harmed and attempted to kill a Jewish victim in Brooklyn, N.Y.,” per the complaint.
“I’m working in rehab center privately in Jewish family // I get paid to torture dying jew // I think I almost killed him today actually // If he dies soon that’s killstrike on me,” he wrote in a message, to which he attached “multiple images of his purported client in a hospital bed and bragged about harming the victim,” per the complaint.
The FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces found that the defendant had worked at rehabilitation center in Brooklyn and was employed by an Orthodox Jewish family in July 2022 to assist a family member who has since died.
“Among other things, a member of the family positively identified the now-deceased family member in the photographs sent by Chkhikvishvili,” per the complaint, “and further identified a photograph of Chkhikvishvili shown to him by JTTF personnel as the individual the family had hired, stating that he believed the individual was from Georgia and that he went by the name ‘Michael,’ which is an English iteration of Michail.”
Chkhikvishvili faces up to 50 years in prison collectively for the four charges: soliciting violent felonies, conspiring to solicit violent felonies, distributing information about making explosives and spreading threatening communications.