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Federal prosecutors announced Monday that they had filed a criminal complaint against a 28-year-old man who they said was planning to trample pedestrians on the waterfront at National Harbor, a popular tourist site along the Potomac River near Washington. .
The man, Rondell Henry of Germantown, Maryland, was inspired by the ISIS terrorist group when he stole a U-Haul van from a parking lot in Alexandria, Virginia, on March 26, according to the US Attorney's Office in Maryland. He was accused of transporting a stolen vehicle between states.
Prosecutors claim that Mr. Henry, a computer engineer, drove the van early on March 27th at Dulles International Airport, where he went out and tried unsuccessfully for more than two hours to find a way to pass the security. Mr. Henry then returned to the U-Haul and drove to the Maryland National Harbor where he arrived around 10 am, they said.
According to prosecutors, Mr. Henry went around looking for an ideal place to mimic the attack of the day of July 14, 2016 in Nice, France, in which a truck passed through a crowd of spectators, making more than 80 dead.
Because the crowd at the water's edge of the National Harbor on Wednesday, March 27 was lean, he delayed his plans, prosecutors said. He broke into a boat and hid there all night, according to court documents.
The next morning, police officers discovered the stolen U-Haul and arrested Mr. Henry after he jumped over a security fence from the boat dock, prosecutors said. Authorities first identified Mr. Henry through registration records left in his BMW parked in Alexandria, near the place where U-Haul had been stolen, they said.
Mr. Henry had no escape plan because he had no intention of surviving the attack, prosecutors said.
"I was just going to continue driving," he said, quoted in a motion for detention filed Monday by federal prosecutors. "I was not going to stop."
A detention hearing is scheduled for Tuesday at 12:45. Federal District Court in the Greenbelt, Md.
Thomas Mooney, a lawyer who represents Mr. Henry in connection with a state robbery and malicious destruction of charges related to the episode of the national port, said that he would plead not guilty. A public defender representing Mr. Henry at the federal level did not immediately respond to a call for comments Monday afternoon.
Mr. Henry would have disappeared after leaving work around noon on March 26 and his family was concerned about his "physical and emotional well-being", according to a public notice issued by the Montgomery County Police Department.
A spokeswoman for Hughes Network Systems, a broadband satellite company from Germantown, said that Henry had already been employed in this business as an independent contractor. The company declined to provide details on its position.
Seamus Hughes, deputy director of the George Washington University program on extremism, said the vehicles have long been used as weapons of terror. In 2010, al-Qaeda promoted the use of cars to crush people in its online magazine, in an article titled "The Ultimate Mowing Machine."
However, it is only during the rise of the Islamic State in 2014 that attacks against vehicles have become commonplace in Western countries. The most devastating was the 2016 attack of July 14th. It was followed by an attack on a Christmas market in Berlin in 2016, as well as many smaller attacks inspired by the Islamic State in Europe and North America.
An ISIS motto has become: "No matter what you do, as long as you do something," said Mr. Hughes. And vehicles, of course, are easier to obtain than other weapons.
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