Michael McKevitt was an Irish republican and paramilitary leader. He was the Provisional Irish Republican Army's Quartermaster General. Due to the Provisional IRA's involvement in the Northern Ireland peace process, he formed the Real IRA in protest. His role in the Real IRA led to him being convicted of directing terrorism as the leader of the paramilitary organisation.
The Guildford Four and Maguire Seven were two groups of people, mostly Northern Irish, who were wrongly convicted in English courts in 1975 and 1976 of the Guildford pub bombings of 5 October 1974 and the Woolwich pub bombing of 7 November 1974. All the convictions were eventually overturned in 1989 and 1991 after long campaigns for justice, and the cases, along with those of the Birmingham Six, diminished public confidence in the English criminal justice system.
Annie Mae Aquash was a First Nations activist and Mi'kmaq tribal member from Nova Scotia, Canada. Aquash moved to Boston in the 1960s and joined other First Nations and Indigenous Americans focused on education, resistance, and police brutality against urban Indigenous peoples. She was a member of the American Indian Movement (AIM) and participated in several occupations with them. In December 1975, she was kidnapped and murdered in the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation by members of AIM. Her body was later found in February 1976. In the 2000s, several members of AIM were convicted of kidnapping and murdering her.
Yassin Aref is poet, writer, and religious scholar of Kurdish background who was the central figure of a controversial sting operation leading to years of incarceration in the Federal Bureau of Prisons. A resident of Albany, New York, Aref was arrested by Federal authorities in August 2004 as part of a sting operation, convicted in October 2006 of conspiracy and money laundering charges and sentenced to 15 years in prison in March 2007. The sting operation revolved around FBI informant Shahed Hussein, who later became notorious for his involvement in other controversial cases of entrapment as well as the Schoarie Limousine crash. In 2023, a federal judge ordered the release of 3 other defendants who were also entrapped in a separate sting by Shahed Hussein, saying that FBI had used a "villain” of an informant, and that "the real lead conspirator was the United States". Aref's case drew criticism from human rights groups such as the ACLU and the NYCLU . In July 2008, an appellate court upheld the convictions, rejecting all of the defense's arguments. The decision caused outrage amongst the local community, as supporters maintained the position that he was being persecuted. Aref completed his 15-year prison sentence in October, 2018 and was deported to Iraqi Kurdistan in June, 2019.
Anthony J. Pellicano is a high-profile Los Angeles private investigator and convicted criminal known as a Hollywood fixer. He served a term of thirty months in a federal prison for illegal possession of explosives, firearms, and a grenade. In 2008, he began serving an additional sentence for subsequent convictions for other crimes, including racketeering and wiretapping. Several other people were also convicted of crimes associated with their involvement with his illegal activities, including his actress girlfriend Sandra Will Carradine, film director John McTiernan, Beverly Hills police officer Craig Stevens, Los Angeles police sergeant Mark Arneson, and attorney Terry Christensen.
Operation Backfire is a multi-agency criminal investigation, led by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), into destructive acts in the name of animal rights and environmental causes in the United States described as eco-terrorism by the FBI. The operation resulted in convictions and imprisonment of a number of people, many of whom were members of the Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation Front.
The Green Scare is legal action by the US government against the radical environmental movement, that occurred mostly in the 2000s. It alludes to the Red Scares, periods of fear over communist infiltration of US society.
The 2006 Ontario terrorism case is the plotting of a series of attacks against targets in Southern Ontario, Canada, and the June 2, 2006 counter-terrorism raids in and around the Greater Toronto Area that resulted in the arrest of 14 adults and 4 youths . These individuals have been characterized as having been inspired by al-Qaeda.
Shahawar Matin Siraj is a Pakistani-American who was convicted in 2006 of terrorism conspiracy, regarding a plot to bomb a New York City Subway station in Manhattan. Siraj worked at an Islamic bookstore in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. Over a period of several months in 2004 he was recorded by an FBI informer Osama Eldawoody regarding a plot to plant a bomb in the 34th Street–Herald Square station. According to the New York City Police Department, Siraj was "extremely impressionable due to severe intellectual limitations" and never actually agreed to carry out an attack. He was sentenced to 30 years in prison in January 2007.
Hamid Hayat is a United States citizen of Pakistani descent from Lodi, California. His father, Umer Hayat, was born in Pakistan and immigrated to the United States in 1976; he is a naturalized U.S. citizen. Together, they were the subjects of the first terrorism trial in the state of California. Both were alleged to be part of, or associated with, a terrorist sleeper cell.
Colm Murphy was an Irish republican who was the first person to be convicted in connection with the Omagh bombing, but whose conviction was overturned on appeal. While awaiting a retrial on criminal charges, Murphy was found liable for the bombing in a civil trial, along with Michael McKevitt, Liam Campbell and Seamus Daly. He was subsequently cleared of criminal charges in February 2010.
Brandon Michael Darby is an American conservative blogger and activist. He first became known in the fall of 2005 for actions in New Orleans in efforts to help residents, where he was a co-founder of the Common Ground Collective organized there. It coordinated the efforts of hundreds of volunteers from across the country for years.
On May 20, 2009, US law enforcement arrested four men in connection with a fake plot concocted by a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) informant to shoot down military airplanes flying out of an Air National Guard base in Newburgh, New York, and blow up two synagogues in the Riverdale community of the Bronx using weapons supplied by the FBI. The group was led by Shahed Hussain, a Pakistani criminal who was working for the FBI to avoid deportation for having defrauded the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles. Hussain has never been charged in the United States with any terrorism related offenses and was paid nearly US$100,000 by the FBI for his work on this plot.
Mark J. Reichel is a criminal and civil attorney in Sacramento, California and a partner in the law firm Reichel & Plesser, LLP. He is also the vice chairman of the Sacramento board of the American Civil Liberties Union. Reichel has been involved in several prominent criminal and civil cases including: United States v. Eric McDavid and United States v. Grubbs.
The University of Washington firebombing incident was an arson which took place in the early morning hours of May 21, 2001 when a firebomb was set off at Merrill Hall, a part of the University of Washington's Center for Urban Horticulture, causing an estimated $1.5 to $4.1 million in damages. By 2012 four of five accused conspirators behind the attack admitted their guilt in plea bargains. A fifth committed suicide in federal detention while awaiting trial.
Sami Osmakac is an American convicted by a jury on June 10, 2014, following a criminal trial in U.S. District Court, of plotting terrorist attacks in and near Tampa, Florida.
Rasmea Yousef Odeh, also known as Rasmea Yousef, Rasmieh Steve, and Rasmieh Joseph Steve, is a Palestinian Jordanian and former American citizen who was a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) convicted by Israeli military courts for involvement in a 1969 Jerusalem supermarket bombing which killed two young civilians. She was sentenced to life in prison and spent 10 years there before being released in a 1980 prisoner exchange with the PFLP. After her release to Jordan, she immigrated in 1990 to the United States, became a U.S. citizen, and served as associate director at the Arab American Action Network in Chicago, Illinois.
Joshua Ryne Goldberg is an American internet troll, convicted of attempting a bombing on the 14th anniversary of the September 11 attacks while posing as an Islamic terrorist affiliated with ISIS.
Ralph Kenneth Deleon is a Filipino, and legal permanent resident of the United States, who in 2015 was convicted of conspiracy to commit murder of members of the United States military and government, and providing material support for terrorists. Deleon is serving a 25-year sentence.
Eric and "Anna", 14-minute video by The Intercept about the undercover operation
