A 24-year-old former private in the US Army was sentenced to nearly a half-century in prison for plotting to kill the other members of his unit in what prosecutors described as a “murderous ambush” and giving a British neo-Nazi group plans to a sensitive US military installation in the UK, NBC News reports.
Eric Melzer pleaded guilty last year to charges of attempting to murder U.S. service members, providing and attempting to provide material support to terrorists, and illegally transmitting national defense information for the 2020 plot in which he handed plans of a military facility to the British neo-Nazi group the Order of Nine Angles.
Melzer then posted information about the strength, armaments, location and future deployment of his unit to Turkey in hopes of inspiring an al Qaeda-aligned British group O9A to attack them or whatever unit took up their position. Prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, where the case was heard, say Melzer hoped to spark a wider jihad against the American military.