A 19-year-old man accused of inciting a Lodi teen to attack several local synagogues kept a blueprint of a Camden County high school at his home, marked up for an attack and “Project Anarchy” written on it, prosecutors said Wednesday.
Aakash Dalal also confessed to detectives that he was involved in the attacks but that he didn’t think they were going to be serious, Martin Delaney, an assistant Bergen County prosecutor said.
Those were some of the details Delaney disclosed Wednesday during a hearing in Superior Court in Hackensack, persuading a judge to keep Dalal’s bail at $2.5 million, despite a protest from his attorney that the amount was too high.
Prosecutors say Anthony Graziano of Lodi picked the targets, bought items to make Molotov cocktails and carried out the attacks in January, rattling the local Jewish community and putting law enforcement on high alert.
The most serious of the attacks was the firebombing on Jan. 11 of a Rutherford synagogue, where a rabbi lived with his wife and five children. All of them escaped without injuries, authorities said.
Graziano also allegedly tried and failed to start a fire at a Paramus temple, and later gathered bottles and gasoline to launch an attack on the Jewish Center of Paramus, prosecutors said.
Through emails and instant messages, Dalal goaded and advised Graziano all the while on how to cause serious damage, prosecutors said.
The two are also accused of spray-painting anti-Semitic and white supremacist graffiti on two temples in Maywood and Hackensack in December.
Delaney said at the hearing that police searched Dalal’s apartment after receiving a tip.
“The first thing they see when they go in is the blueprint” of John F. Kennedy Memorial Elementary School in West Berlin in Camden County, Delaney said.
The blueprint had circles and markings on it, “in what can only be described as an attack plan,” Delaney said. He did not explain in court how Dalal might have obtained blueprints for a public school nearly 100 miles away.
Defense attorney Chris Delorenzo argued that his client was only being prosecuted for the use of malicious words.
Delaney, however, recited some of the correspondence between Dalal and Graziano, arguing that Dalal was more of an active conspirator than a mere spectator and commentator.
Dalal told Graziano to make sure that his Molotov cocktails broke through windows when he threw them and advised him to consider breaking the windows first with a rock before throwing the firebombs, Delaney said.
After one of the attacks, Dalal told Graziano, “You are being honored in the underground,” Delaney said.
In one of the last communications between the two, Graziano told Dalal that he “rebooted” his computer and wiped out everything, Delaney said.
Dalal’s response was, “Well done. No trace of anything left,” Delaney said.
Join the official YWN WhatsApp status
One Response
Many times when the FBI gets involved with a “Terrorist Plot”, i get this feeling that they are just trying to get some attention, and they don’t really have a Terrorist that had the ability to do anything
Most of the times they set them up, so they can get more funding.