State Department diplomatic security officer pleads guilty to storming Capitol

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State Department diplomatic security officer pleads guilty to storming Capitol

2024-09-14 08:03 Last Updated At：08:10

WASHINGTON (AP) — A man who worked as a U.S. State Department diplomatic security officer pleaded guilty on Friday to joining a mob's attack on the U.S. Capitol over three years ago, court records show.

Kevin Michael Alstrup is scheduled to be sentenced on Feb. 12 by U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss.

Alstrup pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct and parading, demonstrating or picketing in a Capitol building. Both counts are misdemeanors carrying a maximum prison sentence of six months.

An attorney who represented Alstrup at his plea hearing didn't immediately respond to an email seeking comment.

A State Department spokesperson said Alstrup was a contractor who worked as a uniformed guard for the State Department starting in 2010. He no longer works at the department, the spokesperson said in an email.

Alstrup admitted that he entered the Capitol building through the Senate Wing doors after other rioters had forced them open and broken windows aside them. He took photographs with a camera before leaving the building roughly 28 minutes after entering.

Alstrup was arrested in February in Washington, D.C., where he lived on Jan. 6. The judge allowed him to remain free until his sentencing.

The FBI determined that Alstrup, through his State Department work, “is familiar with providing security and protection for high-ranking government officials or sensitive locations, like embassies.” One of Alstrup's supervisors identified him in a photograph of the riot, the FBI said.

At a press briefing on Friday, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said that "we fully support the work by our colleagues at the Department of Justice to hold anyone responsible for violations of law on that horrific day accountable for those violations.”

Approximately 1,500 people have been charged with Capitol riot-related federal crimes. More than 900 of them have pleaded guilty. Over 200 others have been convicted by judges or juries after trials.

Also on Friday, a West Virginia man who was employed as a firefighter in Arlington County, Virginia, was arrested on charges that he assaulted police officers during the riot. Brian Holmes was captured on video pushing two police officers up stairs outside the Capitol on Jan. 6, according to an FBI agent's affidavit.

Arlington County Fire Department employees told the FBI in July that they had worked with Holmes for roughly one year. Holmes was employed by the department at the time of the riot but hasn't worked there since April 2023, according to Fire Capt. Nathaniel Hiner.

“When made aware of the allegations, the ACFD cooperated fully with investigators,” Hiner said in an email.

Associated Press reporter Matt Lee in Washington contributed.

A 9-year-old is among 5 killed in the Christmas market attack in Germany

2024-12-22 00:32 Last Updated At：00:40

MAGDEBURG, Germany (AP) — A 9-year-old was among five people killed when a Saudi doctor drove into a Christmas market teeming with holiday shoppers in the German city of Magdeburg, an official said Saturday, as people mourned the victims and their shaken sense of security.

City official Ronni Krug said he didn’t have further information on the adults who were killed on Friday night. He said 200 people were injured, of whom 41 in serious or very serious condition.

Prosecutor Horst Nopens said the suspect, a 50-year-old Saudi doctor, is under investigation on suspicion of murder, attempted murder and bodily harm. He is currently being questioned. He has lived in Germany since 2006, practicing medicine in Bernburg, about 40 kilometers (25 miles) south of Magdeburg, officials said.

“There is no more peaceful and cheerful place than a Christmas market,” Chancellor Olaf Scholz said. “What a terrible act it is to injure and kill so many people there with such brutality.”

Neurosurgeon Mahmoud Elenbaby said some 80 patients were brought to Magdeburg’s university hospital on Friday night.

“We managed to stabilize most of them, but many are still in intensive care, and some are also in critical condition,” Elenbaby told The Associated Press as he dashed into the hospital cafeteria to buy himself a cola.

Several German media outlets identified the suspect as Taleb A., withholding his last name in line with privacy laws, and reported that he was a specialist in psychiatry and psychotherapy.

Mourners lit candles and placed flowers outside a church near the market on the cold and gloomy day. Several people stopped and cried. A Berlin church choir whose members witnessed a previous Christmas market attack in 2016 sang Amazing Grace, a hymn about God's mercy, offering their prayers and solidarity with the victims.

There were still no answers Saturday as to what motivated the man to drive his black BMW into a crowd in the eastern German city.

Describing himself as a former Muslim, the suspect shared dozens of tweets and retweets daily focusing on anti-Islam themes, criticizing the religion and congratulating Muslims who left the faith.

He also accused German authorities of failing to do enough to combat what he said was the “Islamism of Europe.”

Nopens, the prosecutor, said the motive may have been “dissatisfaction with the treatment of Saudi refugees in Germany” but investigators are still trying to get to the bottom of what was behind the attack.

“He has at least talked about the motive,” Nopens said. “And we have to clear up how much of that is true.”

Investigators have to analyze computers, mobile devices and other evidence, “and at the end of the day we will know, or at least hope to know, what drove him to this act.”

“We have talked about an attack,” he said. “Whether it was a terror attack, we don’t know yet.”

The violence shocked Germany and the city, bringing its mayor to the verge of tears and marring a festive event that’s part of a centuries-old German tradition. It prompted several other German towns to cancel their weekend Christmas markets as a precaution and out of solidarity with Magdeburg’s loss. Berlin kept its markets open but has increased its police presence at them.

Germany has suffered a string of extremist attacks in recent years, including a knife attack that killed three people and wounded eight at a festival in the western city of Solingen in August.

Those attacks have led cities to beef up security at Christmas markets and other events.

On Friday the suspect used a special escape and rescue route to enter the market, according to Tom-Oliver Langhans, director of the Magdeburg police.

Magdeburg is a city of about 240,000 people, west of Berlin, that serves as Saxony-Anhalt’s capital. Friday’s attack came eight years after an Islamic extremist drove a truck into a crowded Christmas market in Berlin, killing 13 people and injuring many others. The attacker was killed days later in a shootout in Italy.

Chancellor Scholz and Interior Minister Nancy Faeser traveled to Magdeburg on Saturday, and a memorial service is to take place in the city cathedral in the evening. Faeser ordered flags lowered to half-staff at federal buildings across the country.

Verified bystander footage distributed by the German news agency dpa showed the suspect’s arrest at a tram stop in the middle of the road. A nearby police officer pointing a handgun at the man shouted at him as he lay prone, his head arched up slightly. Other officers swarmed around the suspect and took him into custody.

Thi Linh Chi Nguyen, a 34-year-old manicurist from Vietnam whose salon is located in a mall across from the Christmas market, was on the phone during a break when she heard loud bangs and thought at first they were fireworks. She then saw a car drive through the market at high speed. People screamed and a child was thrown into the air by the car.

Shaking as she described the horror of what she witnessed, she recalled seeing the car bursting out of the market and turning right onto Ernst-Reuter-Allee street and then coming to a standstill at the tram stop where the suspect was arrested.

The number of injured people was overwhelming.

“My husband and I helped them for two hours. He ran back home and grabbed as many blankets as he could find because they didn’t have enough to cover the injured people. And it was so cold," she said.

The market itself was still cordoned off Saturday with red-and-white tape and police vans every 50 meters (yards). Police with machine pistols guarded every entry to the market. Some thermal security blankets still lay on the street.

Christmas markets are a German holiday tradition cherished since the Middle Ages, now successfully exported to much of the Western world.

Moulson reported from Berlin and Gera from Warsaw, Poland.