- The FBI arrested four Los Angeles–area members of the Turtle Island Liberation Front, stopping a suspected New Year’s Eve plot to place multiple pipe bombs at five or more locations across the city.
- According to the DOJ, the group documented detailed bomb-making and evasion plans, tested explosives in the Mojave Desert, and was intercepted before assembling a functional device.
- According to documents, the conspirators planned to exploit New Year’s Eve fireworks for cover and mark targets with an inverted red triangle, a symbol tied to extremist ideology and deliberate targeting.
The FBI took four suspects into custody over the weekend, disrupting a plan to detonate a series of pipe bombs at five or more locations across Los Angeles.
The four people arrested — Audrey Ilene Carroll, 30; Zachary Aaron Page, 32; Tina Lai, 41; and Dante Gaffield, 24 — are members of the Turtle Island Liberation Front, also known as TILF. All four suspects are from the Los Angeles area.
TILF is an “extremist group motivated by pro-Palestinian, anti-law-enforcement, and anti-government ideology,” per the FBI.
Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote on Monday morning that the group also had plans to target ICE agents and vehicles.
FBI finds the conspirators building bombs in the Mojave Desert
According to the Department of Justice’s criminal complaint, one of the suspects gave an undercover source working with the FBI an eight-page, handwritten document detailing the bombing plot.
Titled “Operation Midnight Sun,” the plans instructed conspirators to leave “complex pipe bombs” at five marked places around Los Angeles. It also had instructions on how to make the bombs, how to avoid leaving evidence behind and how to have a believable alibi.
The document specified the five target locations and left five additional blank slots, captioned, “Add more if enough comrades.”
On Dec. 12, the FBI said Carroll, Page, Lai and Gaffield traveled 3½ hours east of L.A. to the Mojave Desert to build and detonate test explosives. They allegedly unloaded the bomb-making materials cars, set up a tent to keep them shaded from the sun and assembled them on a table.
FBI agents intervened and arrested the group of four before they had completed assembling a functional pipe bomb.
Why New Year’s Eve?
According to documents released by the FBI, the group believed New Year’s Eve was ideal for the attack, because “fireworks will be going off at this time, so explosions will be less likely to be noticed as immediately as any normal day.”
While major U.S. cities are still set to throw New Year’s Eve celebrations, Paris has canceled its live concert on the Champs-Élysées over public safety risks. Instead, the city will stream a pre-recorded video broadcast.
A Parisian police commissioner told France Info, “Last year, we had more scares in two hours of New Year’s Eve celebrations on the Champs-Élysées than in three weeks of the Olympic Games.”
On Dec. 31, 2024, nearly 1,000 cars were burned and more than 400 people were arrested for acts of “senseless and endemic violence,” per The New York Post.
Why the red, upside-down triangle?
The plans obtained by the FBI outlined the suspects’ alleged plan of attack for New Year’s Eve.
The plans say there would be teams of four on the ground at each location, with one additional person assisting from afar.
Three on-the-ground members would plant “backpacks with IEDs at different points along their assigned buildings,” and one member would graffiti a “red triangle and 1 message of the team’s choosing on the sidewalk closest to the building, while the other 3 are placing the devices,” according to the FBI.
The inverted red triangle was used in Nazi Germany to “identify political prisoners in concentration camps.” More recently, the symbol appeared in Hamas propaganda and during the terror group’s Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel.
The symbol has served as a marker of deliberate targeting, signaling that a site is about to be attacked or is under attack.
On November 28, Turtle Island Liberation Front LA posted a photo of two women holding signs with the inverted triangle. One said, “Death to ICE!!!” And the other said in Arabic, “Israel has the right to go to hell only.”
The “death to ICE” sign was found in Carroll’s home, according to the Department of Justice’s criminal complaint.