An Israeli teenager with dual citizenship faced federal charges on Friday, accused of making Bomb Threats against Jewish Community Centers. The complaints that were filed in US federal courts in Florida and Georgia linked him to hundreds of threatening calls between 2015 and 2017.
The individual has been identified as 18-year-old Michael Ron David Kadar, who was arrested on March 23 at his home in Ashkelon, Israel. Kadar is also accused of making 240 threatening calls to schools in the United States and Canada between August and December 2015. The bomb threats forced the schools to evacuate thousands of students.
The evidence against the teen
The evidence against Kadar is quite overwhelming, to say the least. Authorities have recovered a flash drive that contained recordings of several telephoned bomb threats. At the time of Kadar’s arrest, he spontaneously told authorities that arrested him that he did not make any bomb threats to Jewish community centers, even though the police did not mention anything about those particular threats. In addition, the person who made the threatening calls had a speech impediment, according to the recordings. Kadar has the same speech defect and allegedly used masking technology to disguise his voice.
The federal charges
In Florida, Kadar is facing charges of 15 threats, which includes bomb threats he allegedly made to a United Airlines flight at Orlando’s airport and a number of Jewish schools.
Meanwhile, he faces a single count of threatening a private residence in Georgia. This is because Kadar was not 18 at the time the bomb threats were made in 2015, therefore he cannot be charged as an adult.
Kadar’s mother, who’s American-born, told reporters in an interview that her son was home-schooled due to a brain tumor.
She claimed that her son is autistic and cannot think straight. Meanwhile, Kadar’s defense lawyer in Israel told reports that the US-Israeli teen has a high IQ but has the emotional intelligence of a 5-year-old. Kadar’s Israeli father told reporters, “To all the Jews in America, I want to say clearly, we are very, very sorry, from the bottom of our hearts,” according to Reuters. A formal indictment of the American-Israeli teen is expected to be released within days.
