American Charged With Trying to Firebomb Embassy Building in Tel Aviv

New York|American Charged With Trying to Firebomb Embassy Building in Tel Aviv

An American citizen was charged with trying to firebomb a U.S. Embassy office in Tel Aviv, after he approached the building with Molotov cocktails and had threatened to kill President Trump in a series of social media posts, federal prosecutors said on Sunday.

The man, Joseph Neumeyer, 28, of Colorado, was deported to the United States on Saturday and appeared Sunday in Federal District Court in Brooklyn before Magistrate Judge Peggy Kuo. He is being held at the Metropolitan Detention Center without bail.

Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement that Mr. Neumeyer had been charged with “planning a devastating attack targeting our embassy in Israel, threatening death to Americans and President Trump’s life.”

A lawyer for Mr. Neumeyer, Jeff Dahlberg of the Federal Defenders of New York, declined to comment.

Mr. Neumeyer’s arrest comes at a time of unease for embassy officials in Israel and the United States. Last week, two Israeli Embassy employees were shot and killed outside the Jewish Museum in Washington. A man, Elias Rodriguez, was arrested and charged with first-degree murder in the shooting; he said he “did it for Palestine,” according to an F.B.I. affidavit.

Mr. Neumeyer, a dual citizen of the United States and Germany, began making a series of disturbing posts on his Facebook account in late March, according to a criminal complaint filed in the Eastern District of New York.

“We are killing Trump and Musk now,” read one post from March 22, in an apparent reference to Elon Musk, the tech billionaire and adviser to Mr. Trump. It was followed by subsequent posts that month that wished death upon Mr. Trump.

Mr. Neumeyer left the United States in February and arrived in Israel on April 23, prosecutors said. On May 19, Mr. Neumeyer wrote on Facebook, “Join me this afternoon in Tel Aviv — we are burning down the US embassy.”

The U.S. embassy was moved to Jerusalem in 2018, but the United States maintains a branch office in Tel Aviv.

That afternoon, according to prosecutors, Mr. Neumeyer approached the employee entrance of the Tel Aviv office carrying a dark backpack. He spat at a guard, who then tapped on Mr. Neumeyer’s shoulder and tried to apprehend him.

In trying to stop Mr. Neumeyer from fleeing, the guard grabbed his backpack and discovered a bottle with a black cloth jutting out, which the guard understood to be a Molotov cocktail bottle after smelling an odor of “pure” alcohol, prosecutors said.

Mr. Neumeyer got away but was later arrested by Israeli police officers at his hotel, where he said his backpack had Molotov cocktail bottles with vodka inside. According to prosecutors, Mr. Neumeyer’s backpack contained three bottles with ethanol.

“Death to America. Death to the West,” read one of Mr. Neumeyer’s final posts on May 19, according to prosecutors.