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An 18-year-old man living in Israel has been charged over scores of threatening calls he allegedly made to Jewish community centres and schools in the US.
A month after his arrest in Israel, Michael Ron David Kadar was charged with 28 counts of making threatening calls and conveying false information to police, according to an indictment filed on Friday in a federal court in Orlando, Florida.
Separately, he was charged with three more counts of making threatening calls, conveying false information and cyberstalking in an indictment filed in a federal court in Athens, Georgia.
Kadar has dual Israeli and US citizenship.
The calls to the Jewish community centres and schools stoked fears of rising anti-Semitism in the US, and led to campus evacuations in February.
Online federal court records in Florida showed no attorney listed for Kadar.
At the time of his arrest last month, his lawyer in Israel said Kadar had a "very serious medical condition" that might have affected his behaviour.
She said the condition had prevented him from attending elementary school, high school or enlisting in the army, which is compulsory for most Jewish men in Israel.
The JCC Association of North America said in a statement that it welcomed the charges against Kadar and that it was "enormously proud of the extraordinary commitment to safety and security" at the community centres.
The Florida indictment said Kadar made 245 threatening calls, most of them to Jewish community centres and schools, from January to March, using an online calling service that disguised his voice and allowed him to hide his identity.
In the calls, Kadar graphically described children's deaths, the indictment said.
He recorded each of the calls himself and kept them in organised files at his home in Ashkelon, Israel, along with news articles describing the police responses to the threats.
He also paid for the online calls using the semi-anonymous currency bitcoin.
A large antenna at his apartment building allowed him to make long-distance, outdoor wireless connections, the indictment said.
The Florida indictment said recordings of the calls stripped of the software-enabled disguise revealed a speech impediment in the caller's voice that matched Kadar's.
The Georgia indictment connected Kadar to several incidents of "swatting", in which authorities are called to respond to an emergency that ends up being fake.
The indictment alleged that in January the University of Georgia Police Department received a phone call about a home invasion that ended up being untrue.
AP
Topics: law-crime-and-justice, courts-and-trials, judaism, community-and-society, united-states, israel