Colorado Man Charged In Threat on Obama, Mall of America

A 20-year-old southwestern Colorado man has been indicted on charges of threatening to kill President Obama and blow up the Mall of America in Bloomington.

Timothy Ryan Gutierrez, of Cortez, was indicted Tuesday in federal court in Denver. A warrant has been issued for Gutierrez’s arrest, and authorities declined to discuss his whereabouts.

He faces one count each of transmission of threats and falsely threatening to use explosives.

Gutierrez sent an e-mail to the FBI eight days before Obama was inaugurated, the indictment alleges, and wrote: “I’m going to assassinate the new president of the United States of America. PS you have 48 hours to stop it from happening.”

Federal court records also say he e-mailed the FBI with a threat against the mall: “I have rigged 40 pounds of C4 [a moldable plastic explosive] … and my favorite TNT to 7 cars outside the Mall of America.”

Mall officials were “notified immediately” by the FBI and Bloomington police of the threat, said Maureen Bausch, the mall’s executive vice president of business development. The mall was given the all-clear after 16 to 18 hours, Bausch said, once it was determined “the threat wasn’t valid” and a search of the giant retail and entertainment complex turned up nothing suspicious.

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White House Concerned Over al Qaeda Terror Attack During Transition

President Bush on Thursday said he is concerned that al Qaeda will try to test the incoming Obama administration with a terror attack on U.S. soil, and said he will meet with the president-elect Monday to talk about homeland defense and the economy.

Terrorists, the president said, “would like nothing more than to exploit this period of change to harm the American people.”

White House press secretary Dana Perino stressed that the U.S. government has no specific intelligence of any imminent attacks.

“I don’t know anything specific, but we do know this a heightened period of concern,” Mrs. Perino said. “We know that al Qaeda and others try to test a new administration.”

“That is something that we’re very concerned about. We’ve seen that in other countries,” Mrs. Perino said, mentioning the example of a 2004 bombing in Madrid, Spain that killed 191 people.

That bombing, however, was committed just before national elections in an attempt to influence the outcome, by what authorities deemed to be terrorists trying to imitate al Qaeda.

But Mr. Bush, speaking to more than 1,000 executive branch employees from across the federal government on the South Lawn, said the terrorist threat is a main reason that “all of must ensure that the next president and his team can hit the ground running.”

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