Underground cult linked to neo-Nazis exposed after soldier allegedly planned attacks on colleagues

The role of an underground cult espousing saatanism and Nazism, which was founded in Britain, is under scrutiny after the arrest of an American soldier for allegedly conspiring to murder fellow members of the US armed forces.

A number of suspects are under investigation with further arrests expected after Private Ethan Phelan Melzer confessed to passing on sensitive military information to members of the Order of the Nine Angles (O9A): an organisation US authorities described as “an occult-based neo-Nazi and racially motivated violent extremist group”.

Mr Melzer, “the enemy within” according to investigators, was detained on 10 June following an operation by the FBI and US military police. He had, it is claimed, leaked details of the deployment of his unit to followers of O9A and RapeWaffen Division, a US neo-Nazi network, with the explicit aim of organising an attack at a base abroad.

An unsealed grand jury indictment charged that the aim was “to solicit assistance for a mass casualty attack on his US army unit once it deployed to Turkey”. Audrey Strauss, acting US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, said: “Ethan Melzer, a private in the US army, was the enemy within. Mr Melzer allegedly attempted to orchestrate a murderous ambush on his own unit by unlawfully revealing its location, strength, and armaments to a neo-Nazi, anarchist, white-supremacist group.”

O9A has grown in influence among a number of neo-Nazi groups internationally including the US-based Atomwaffen Division, which has been linked to five murders. Atomwaffen’s UK arm, the Sonnenkrieg Division (SKD), was prescribed as a terrorist organisation by home secretary, Priti Patel, in February this year.

Members of the SKD had been convicted of a number of serious offences. They include Michal Szewczuk, 19, from Leeds and Oskar Dunn-Koczorowski, 18, from west London, who were jailed on terror charges in June last year. The two men had incited attacks on Prince Harry, who they called a “race traitor” for marrying Meghan Markle, as well as glorifying Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik.

A 16-year-old boy who became the youngest person to be convicted of planning a terror attack in the UK last year was influenced, according to the police, by O9A online literature.

The boy, from Durham, who wrote about the “inevitable race war” was sentenced to six years in jail for preparation of a terrorist act and disseminating terrorist information. O9A, the court was told, was “self-consciously, explicitly malevolent” and the “most prominent and recognisable link between satanism and the extreme right”.

O9A, however, is not in the banned list in the UK. Last March the anti-racist group Hope Not Hate delivered an open letter, signed by a cross-party group of MPs, to the home secretary asking for the group to be banned. The call has been backed by the Jewish Labour Movement.

Yvette Cooper, the chairperson of the Commons Home Affairs Select Committee, said at the time that Ms Patel “should immediately” refer the group to the government’s review body for prescribing extremist and dangerous organisation.

As well proclaiming white supremacy, O9A has also supported Isis, al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden in pursuit of its belief that violent jihad would help trigger a cleansing racial war, and hasten the collapse of the “decadent Judeo-Christian establishment”, in what it calls a “process of accelerationism”.

Antisemitism is also seen as a binding factor. David Myatt, a once-prominent figure in the British hard-right who, it is claimed, was associated with O9A, wrote a manual on Aryan revolution which was cited as a source of inspiration for the neo-Nazi London nail bomber David Copeland, while a text by him defending suicide attacks has featured on the website of Hamas.

A number of analysts of extreme right-wing movements, including those from the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight, had claimed that Mr Myatt had been part of the O9A using the pseudonym “Anton Long”. Mr Myatt has denied the claim.

Mr Melzer, 22, from Louisville, Kentucky, allegedly passed on information to O9A members through a restricted social media site about the deployment of his unit to Turkey. The aim, say US prosecutors, was to instigate an Islamist attack. According to the FBI, he passed along the location of a military installation where his unit was heading, weaponry it used, the number of soldiers stationed at the base, and the base’s vulnerabilities.

Mr Melzer was arrested after the FBI had placed an informer into the network. Ms Strauss, the US attorney, claimed “Melzer allegedly provided this potentially deadly information intending that it be conveyed to jihadist terrorists”.

Brian Levin, a terrorism expert at California State University in San Bernardino, described O9A in the US media as “a decades old extreme satanic Nazi cult whose glorification of violence and mysticism has found a renewed international audience, including some young violent American neo-Nazis”.

Robert Emerson, a British security analyst, said: “It started in the UK, but has a wide reach now. There has been a temptation to dismiss people who mix things like the supernatural with extremist ideology as cranks. But this a very well organised group, working in cells, and adept at not leaving tracks.

“We have seen it can also be used to plan acts of very real violence. Some troubled people may be attracted to such a movement, and there are others present there who can manipulate them for their own very nasty political purposes.”

The Church of Satan, based in the US, which describes itself as being the official religious institution dedicated to satansim, as codified in The Satanic Bible, wanted to stress that it had nothing to do with Nazism. It said O9A was “a bunch of deranged idiots attracted to extreme nonsense”.