A 25-year-old man arrested on suspicion of an explosion outside a Southern California fertility clinic left ‘anti-pro-life’ writings before the attack, police have said.
Guy Edward Bartkus of Twentynine Palms, California, was identified by the FBI as the suspect in the apparent car bomb detonation Saturday in Palm Springs.
Investigators said Bartkus died in the blast, which a senior FBI official called possibly the ‘largest bombing scene that we’ve had in Southern California.’
Bartkus attempted to livestream the explosion and left behind ‘nihilistic writings’ that are being investigated, according to Akil Davis, the assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles field office.
The upscale desert city was shocked by the explosion at the American Reproductive Centres clinic at about 11 am on Saturday.
Davis added: ‘Make no mistake: This is an intentional act of terrorism.’
US Attorney Bilal ‘Bill’ Essayli, the top federal prosecutor in the area, said he left ‘anti-pro-life writings’ and added: ‘This was a targeted attack against the IVF facility.
‘Make no mistake: we are treating this, as I said yesterday, as an intentional act of terrorism.’
The bombing injured four other people, though Mr Davis said all embryos at the facility were saved.
‘Good guys one, bad guys zero,’ he said.
Dr Maher Abdallah, who runs the fertility clinic, confirmed all of his staff were safe and accounted for.
‘I really have no clue what happened,’ Dr Abdallah said. ‘Thank God today happened to be a day that we have no patients.’
The blast caved in the building’s roof and blew a wide debris field across a sidewalk and four lanes of the street on the other side of the structure.
Rhino Williams, 47, was chatting with customers at a restaurant he helps manage inside the Skylark Hotel just over a block away from the scene when he heard a huge boom.
Everything rattled, he said, and Williams — who has a background in aviation — immediately sprinted to the scene to see if anyone was in need of help, thinking a helicopter might have crashed.
He said he saw a building had ‘blown out’ into the street, with bricks and debris scattered everywhere, and spotted a car’s front axle on fire in the building’s parking lot.
Nima Tabrizi, 37, from Santa Monica, said he was inside a cannabis dispensary nearby when he felt a massive explosion.
‘The building just shook, and we go outside and there’s massive cloud smoke,’ he said.
‘Crazy explosion. It felt like a bomb went off. … We went up to the scene, and we saw human remains.’
