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Two Unrelated Incidents Target Abortion Clinics

A nurse in North Carolina fired shots into an Asheville clinic and a member of the Ku Klux Klan in Pennsylvania was arrested for plotting to bomb abortion clinics in two unrelated incidents last week.

Registered nurse Brenda Kaye Phillips called Asheville, North Carolina, police last week and confessed to firing a .12-gauge shotgun into the Asheville-based abortion clinic twice during the middle of the night on February 13, according to the Asheville Citizen-Times. No one was in the building at the time of the shooting and no one was injured. Phillips told police officials she wanted to do some damage to the building, the Citizen-Times reports. Phillips remains in detention and is awaiting federal charges.

The Asheville-based clinic is no stranger to anti-abortion violence. Four-years ago police found a partially exploded bomb outside the clinic and two days later another bombing occurred at the same clinic. The clinic was also one of several hundred clinics that received anthrax threats in 2000.

In Pennsylvania, a leader of a local Ku Klux Klan faction in Pittsburgh was arrested for plotting to bomb abortion clinics. David Wayne Hull, an Imperial Wizard of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, was detained on February 13 after an informant alerted FBI officials that Hull was attempting to obtain grenades and had possession of self-made bombs, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Hull is apparently a longtime KKK member with ties to the neo-Nazi Aryan Nations and racist Christian Identity groups, the Post-Gazette reports. He is reportedly featured on his web site in full Klan attire in front of a Confederate flag posing with a rifle. “This is a militant, Christian organization,” the web site proclaims, according to the Post-Gazette.

Hull planned to hold bomb-making sessions at Klan meetings and had turned his own vehicle into a “suicide-bomb on wheels” complete with a special detonation trigger. He confirmed that he intended to “blow-up” abortion clinics, and when he was asked about the possibility of people being injured in the attacks he said, “if they’re there, they are killers or a woman killing a fetus; either way, [profanity] ’em,” according to the Post-Gazette.

Hull is being held with a possibility of being released on bond to await a federal trial.

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Sources:

Associated Press 2/14/03, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 2/14/03, 2/18/03, 2/19/03, 2/20/03, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review 2/14/03, 2/15/03, Asheville Citizen-Times 2/13/03

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