NEW YORK – Authorities have arrested a man for allegedly making threats on social media against the president of another country during a period before the United Nations General Assembly, the New York Southern District court announced Monday.
According to the court document, Enrique Figueroa faces charges of interstate threats and threats against a foreign official. The investigation was conducted in conjunction with the United States Secret Service and the FBI with the New York Joint Counter-Terrorism Task Force.
Possibly the defendant’s threat could have been directed at the president of the Dominican Republic, Luis Abinader, who arrived in New York over the weekend to participate in the National Assembly of the United Nations that begins on Tuesday, September 21. This according to unofficial information from the president’s team, but there is still no confirmation from the local authorities.
The court report indicates that apparently from at least August to around September the defendant made threats of kidnapping and murder online against the president of another country, who was identified as “Individual-1”. In addition, during September, he also made the same threats, when that president was already in New York City.
The report indicates that among Figueroa’s publications there is a photograph of a military-style assault rifle and that around September 11 he would have tried to travel from the Big Apple to the country of that president, identified as “Country-1” , but he couldn’t because his passport was expired.
Figueroa was voluntarily questioned on September 17 and warned that his posts were threatening. On this day, the defendant claimed that he made the posts on social media and that they could be perceived as threatening, but that he did not intend to harm anyone. He pointed out that he made the publications to warn that if corruption continued in that country they could harm him.
However, the defendant allegedly continued to upload these types of messages against the president who was already in the Big Apple for the UN event, the report says. This would have published on Saturday a photograph of that president in New York City in a caravan, the report said. In this he would have written “you have 24 hours to meet me, otherwise you will be out of power in 30 days.”
That same day, he reportedly posted a photograph of him on a telephone warning “if you don’t answer my call, (President’s name) won’t leave the United States, then you’ll know who’s crazy.”
However, Figueroa told authorities that the Instagram account was used by a friend, who was a fan of his. He also told law enforcement officials that they were preventing him from being vice president.
Subsequently, Figueroa gave his consent for officials to search his cell phones. And although he was logged into the social media accounts on which some of the threats were posted, he did not log into the Instagram account.
Another type of threats that Figueroa made, the court says, occurred around August 22, in which he would have used his Facebook account to publish a video in Spanish where he allegedly said that the president had betrayed him and made comments about the murder of the President of Haiti in July.
A senior official says there is no evidence to suggest the suspect had any means of attempting to carry out a potential plot, but stressed the importance of taking those threats seriously, especially now that more than 100 world leaders converge on Manhattan.
Information from Figueroa’s attorney was not immediately known.
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