UPDATE: Right-wing extremist in Illinois caught with pipe bombs was building more explosives

Dalton Mattus was working on something.

The right-wing extremist caught a few weeks back near my hometown has been charged in federal court for possessing homemade pipe bombs, and the criminal complaint in the case shows Dalton Mattus had as many as 11 more bombs in the works.

I’ll get to the tick tock of what we now know about the timeline but first, the most important part: Mattus had three other completed bombs at his apartment and eight more that were under construction, the federal complaint reveals. He also had a gun that he had stolen from his father. 

After discovering pipe bombs in a bag Mattus had in his possession when he and a driver were pulled over on May 21 in Pekin, Illinois, local police called in a federal agent to search Mattus’ apartment. That agent had expertise in explosives. He was able to detail for law enforcement and prosecutors exactly what Mattus was building. Specifically, the agent found Mattus had completed three pipe bombs rigged with BBs. That’s in addition to the two that he had under the passenger seat of the car in which police pulled him over. But perhaps the most troubling part is that Mattus was building more. The agent discovered eight more bombs under construction in the form of “cardboard bodies [...] used in the construction of destructive devices with exposed pyrotechnic fuses.”

This does not sound to me like a guy who simply made bombs as a hobby or had just stumbled upon bomb-making instructions online and decided to play around with improvised explosive devices. This sounds like a guy who was preparing for something. While we still don’t know if Mattus had any specific plans for the bombs he was making, the complaint filed in federal court last week alludes to other information known to police.

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