X-ray weapon plot to kill Muslims: Eric Feight jailed

HE was known as “Yoda” and “Software Guy”.

But there was nothing wise or benign about the plot Eric Feight was involved in.

The 57-year-old systems engineer has admitted building a remote control for a mobile X-ray machine designed to kill Muslims in total silence.

Feight, from upstate New York, pleaded guilty in 2014 to providing material support to terrorists and was this week sentenced to eight years behind bars.

He told a US District Court he was first approached by Glendon Scott Crawford, the plot’s mastermind and member of the Ku Klux Klan, to help create a mobile X-ray device to sterilise medical waste. Feight said he only learned later that the machine was intended for use to target Muslim terrorist cells operating in the US.

“Potential targets were never discussed with me,” Feight said.

The married father-of-three said he became afraid to drop out of the plot after Crawford introduced him to two seemingly dangerous investors in the project. The pair were actually FBI undercover agents.

Investigators taped Crawford, a Navy veteran and also a family man with no criminal history, calling Islam “an opportunist infection of DNA” and “like a rabid animal” back in 2012.

The secret recordings of Crawford discussing ways to kill Muslims from a distance with radiation without the victims even knowing they had been hit were revealed in court last year.

Among the sick ideas he floated were hiding the X-ray killing machine in a van marked “halal meat” as well as a method called thermal depolymerisation where “you can turn (people) into oil”, the TimesUnion reported.

“You don’t want to be anywhere near this thing,” Crawford was allegedly heard to say.

“How much sweeter can it be than a big stack of smelly bodies?”

Crawford’s lawyer argued his client was a conspiracy theorist and a “big talker” who feared a terror attack on US soil was imminent.

“He had, he thought, a unique idea that he thought the bad guys could be destroyed by a device,” defence attorney Kevin Luibrand said.

After being approached by Crawford to build the X-ray machine’s remote control, Feight procrastinated for six months before delivering the invention, but said he refused to integrate it to directly operate the machine because he didn’t think it would actually work.

“You understood what it was you were doing,” Judge Gary Sharpe told him. The machine could have worked and killed people as intended.

“It’s bizarre somebody with your background, your intelligence and your experience would be listening to Crawford’s nonsense,” Sharpe said.

Crawford, 51, an industrial mechanic at General Electric in Schenectady, where Feight was a subcontractor, was convicted of attempting to produce a deadly radiological device, conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction and distributing information about weapons of mass destruction.

Crawford is facing 25 years in prison at his sentencing in March, while prosecutors had originally sought 15 years’ jail for Feight. Feight and Crawford were arrested in 2013 and have been in jail ever since.

Investigators began tracking Crawford in 2012 after he approached two Albany-area Jewish groups.

Authorities said the device was inoperable and nobody was hurt.