A flag flies from the Department of Justice in Washington, US.
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Two people who federal prosecutors say ran a transnational terrorist group on the messaging app Telegram have been charged with promoting violent and deadly hate crimes around the world, authorities said Monday.
The two, Dallas Humber, 34, of Elk Grove, California, and Matthew Allison, 37, of Boise, Idaho, are accused of running the group, Terrorgram Collective, through a network of channels on Telegram, according to the US Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of California.
Humber and Allison incited people who were motivated by hate or bias to carry out violent attacks or plot to destroy infrastructure, prosecutors said in a news release.
At least three hate-driven crimes, including a shooting at an LGBTQ bar in Slovakia, a stabbing near a mosque in Turkey and a plot to attack an energy grid in New Jersey, were tied to guidance shared by Humber and Allison, according to the indictment in the case.
The two also created and shared a list of federal officials to assassinate -- including a US senator, a US District Court judge and a former federal prosecutor -- and included their pictures and addresses.
(Authorities did not name the officials, and there is no indication in charging documents that any assassination took place.)
In a statement, Attorney General Merrick Garland said the arrests were a warning to online hate groups that "committing hate-fueled crimes in the darkest corners of the internet will not hide you, and soliciting terrorist attacks from behind a screen will not protect you."
Noa Oren, a lawyer representing Humber, declined to comment Monday. It was not immediately clear if Allison had legal representation.
According to the indictment, Humber and Allison joined Terrorgram in 2019 and began leading the group in 2022 after a previous leader had been arrested and another became aware that he was being investigated.
Terrorgram is a far-right Telegram network through which white supremacists and neo-fascists share videos, messages and instructions to encourage violence against nonwhite people, the LGBTQ community and government officials.
Humber and Allison operated the group's channels and chats, where they created and disseminated videos and messages praising white supremacist attacks, as well as publications that detailed how to commit terrorist attacks, according to investigators.
Humber told members of a group chat that she would narrate a manifesto for anyone who went through with attacks and killed people, according to charging documents.
The chat included a person who ended up shooting three people, and killing two of them, at an LGBTQ bar in Slovakia, according to the indictment. Humber and Allison took credit, and Humber made an audiobook of his manifesto, prosecutors said.
Investigators also found that the two discussed Terrorgram's connections to a person who stabbed five people outside a mosque in Turkey and praised the attack, according to the indictment.
In another case, court records state, a person plotting an attack on an energy facility in New Brunswick, New Jersey, shared information with an undercover federal agent on how to carry out the attack, including a publication created by Allison and Humber.
The two pushed accelerationism, an ideology rooted in white supremacy that calls for attacks on critical infrastructure in order to collapse society and build a white ethnostate, according to legal documents.
Humber and Allison were each charged with 15 criminal counts relating to soliciting hate crimes, doxxing and creating a hit list of federal officials and politicians, making threats, providing instructions to make bombs and conspiring to provide support to terrorists. The most serious counts carry maximum sentences of 20 years in prison.
Last month, Pavel Durov, Telegram's founder, was arrested by French authorities on wide-ranging charges over his alleged complicity in illegal activity on the app. Various terrorist and crime groups around the world, including the Islamic State group, Hamas and drug traffickers, use Telegram's encrypted messaging to communicate.