Washington: An Indian student, who “had a hard time socialising,” has been convicted of cyberstalking and deported after social media threats of a copycat massacre targeting women at the University of Washington (UW) in Seattle, authorities announced.
Keshav Mukund Bhide, 24, left on an international flight from Seattle-Tacoma International Airport Dec 24 under the watch of special agents, according to the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Using the screen name “Foss Dark,” he had made several threats on social media in June to attack women like a California killer. Bhide was convicted on Dec. 11 in a Washington state-level court of cyberstalking and sentenced to six months. Federal prosecutors, who had also filed charges against him, agreed not go ahead with the federal case if he left the country.
Bhide’s outbursts appeared to have been influenced by Elliot Rodger, a 22-year-old man who killed six people and then himself near the University of California at Santa Barbara last May. Before the attacks, Rodger announced in a YouTube video that he intended to kill women for rejecting him and sexually active men for being better off than him.
In the complaint to the federal court in Seattle, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Special Agent Michael Louis Baldino said Bhide said “hat he “sympathised with Rodger’s personal st”uggles.” He also admitted after his June arrest “hat he “had a hard time socializing at school and had few ”riends,” Baldino said.
In his social media postings as “Foss Dark,” Bhide defended Rodger’s actions and in a comment on June 9 said, “I live in seattle and go to UW, that’s all ill give u. Ill make sure I kill only women, and many more than Elliot accomplished (sic).”
That threat came at a time of heightened insecurity in Seattle as only four days earlier a gunman had attacked the Seattle Pacific University shooting dead one student and wounding two people before he was overpowered by other students. The shooter, Aaron Ybarra, had written of his hatred for everyone but his family and friends and hreatened to “kill everyone.”
Bhide’s case brought echoes of a 2003 case in which an Indian launched an attack at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, killing a student and wounding a professor and a researcher.
A former student there, Biswanath Halder, waged a seven-hour gun battle with police before he was caught hiding in a classroom closet. At Halder’s trial, his own lawyer described him as “the bizarre little man who no one befriends.” He was sentenced to life in 2006 for the attack.
(AGENCIES)
