FBI investigates explosion at anti-LGBTQ church in California

The FBI is investigating a nighttime explosion at a Los Angeles County church known for its anti-LGBTQ sermons, agency officials said on Saturday.

The First Works Baptist Church in El Monte, Calif., Was the site of an explosion and fire around 1:10 a.m., and the FBI believes an improvised explosive device was involved, authorities said.

No injuries were reported, but 14 nearby houses and eight apartments were evacuated as a precaution, El Monte police said.

“The FBI responded overnight with the El Monte Police Department and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department to an IS attack at the First Works Baptist Church in El Monte, Calif.,” He said. the FBI said in a statement.

FBI spokeswoman Laura Eimiller said the office saw hate crimes as a possible motive, but nothing had been ruled out so early in the investigation.

The FBI has assumed jurisdiction over possible terrorist bombings and has been particularly interested in attacks on places of worship since the 1963 bombing of Sixteenth Baptist Street in Birmingham, Alabama, which killed four girls.

El Monte Church is led by Pastor Bruce Mejia, whose anti-LGBTQ sermons caught the attention of protesters and helped place the church on a Southern Poverty Law Center hate group list.

Mejia did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday.

He called women weak and Joe Biden bad. Interracial marriage, he said, was opposed by Jesus because it involves the marriage of a pagan.

In the video for a sermon posted to YouTube in 2018, Mejia said of gay people: “When you seem like someone you know is a [expletive] full-fledged, they just look like a sodomite, they do all these acts, you can see and say, oh okay, they were rejected a long time ago. “

The church is the subject of a petition on change.org seeking to have it recognized as a “hate group” and to leave El Monte. The city of 115,487 people in the San Gabriel Valley suburb is two-thirds of Latino, according to U.S. Census figures.

A group called Keep El Monte Friendly, which had planned a protest on Sunday that was canceled, said in a statement posted on Instagram on Saturday: “We understand that what they preach can upset people. However, we would never do anything. promotion, encouragement, forgiveness any violence or act of harm. “

County Supervisor Hilda Solis, a former United States labor secretary under President Barack Obama, had previously expressed concern about the church in her district before the explosion.

“Although we do not yet know the motive, I am aware of the anti-LGBTQ + and misogynist sermons given by the pastor of First Works Baptist Church;” she said in a statement, “and my office referred questions about the pastor to the county Human Rights Commission which worked in conjunction with the town of El Monte to defuse the situation.”