Mar 3, 2008 6:56 pm US/Mountain
Eco-Terror Group Eyed In Washington Blaze
WOODINVILLE, Wash. (CBS) ―
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Firefighters works to control the scene of several houses on fire on March 2, 2008, in Woodinville, Wash., a community northeast of Seattle.
CBS
Fires burned four multimillion-dollar show homes in a suburb north of Seattle Monday, and authorities found a spray-painted sign purportedly left by a radical environmental group at the scene.
The sign, a white sheet that had the initials of the Earth Liberation Front in scraggly red letters, mocked claims the luxury homes on the "Street of Dreams" were environmentally friendly, according to video images of the sign aired by KING-TV.
"Built Green? Nope black!" the sign said.
"The only thing that's consistent with anything is we have a banner," Kelvin Crenshaw with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms said. "But we don't know the authenticity of that banner."
The fires started at a strip of unoccupied, furnished luxury model homes where developers show off the latest in high-end housing, interior design and landscaping. The homes are later sold.
The blazes are suspicious because they were set in multiple places in separate houses, said Chief Rick Eastman of Snohomish County District Seven. Eastman confirmed that the ELF sign was found at the scene of the fires in the community north of Woodinville, where some homes were still under construction.
According to firefighters, an incendiary device was left in each home, reports CBS affiliate KIRO-TV in Seattle. A total of five devices were found. A device in one home apparently didn't go off.
"They were not explosives, they were set devices set up to burn," Snohomish County Fire Chief Rick Eastman said.
The builder said all the targeted homes had been constructed according to built-green standards. Still there was criticism from at least one group that the project encroached upon sensitive wetlands.
"Right when we started construction out here, there was some concern by a local group about this kind of a wetland area. So there were some issues with the environmental side of things," builder Grey Lundberg said.
ELF is considered a domestic terrorist organization by the FBI, reports CBS News correspondent Bob Orr.
The ELF, or Earth Liberation Front, is a loosely organized collection of radical environmentalists authorities say is responsible for other arsons in the Northwest.
In 1998, Colorado learned first hand about ELF when the group took credit for setting the infamous Vail fires which caused $12 million in damage and led to the indictments of four people affiliated with the group.
A woman is currently trial in Tacoma for a suspected ELF fire at the University of Washington in 2001. Briana Waters, a 32-year-old violin teacher, is accused of serving as a lookout while her friends planted a devastating fire bomb.
The fire is one of the most notorious in a string of arsons that investigators say were perpetrated from the mid-1990s to 2001 by ELF.
No one was hurt in the arson at UW, but its Center for Urban Horticulture was destroyed and rebuilt at a cost of $7 million. It was targeted because the ELF activists mistakenly believed researchers there were genetically engineering trees, investigators said.
(© 2009 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)
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