Independent terrorist actor
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An independent terrorist actor works outside a command structure, unaccountable to the claimed collective cause of a group. They are often motivated by personal gain or vendetta. Examples are:
- The radical Christian extremist Eric Robert Rudolph associated with Christian Identity, who between 1996 and 1998 launched a series of attacks against civilians in the American south, resulting in the deaths of three people and injuries to at least 150 others..
- Timothy McVeigh, an American domestic terrorist convicted and executed for the April 19, 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, which killed 168 people and injured hundreds with a bomb-laden truck.
- Baruch Goldstein, a Jewish extremist previously associated with Kach, a terrorist group inspired by the racist doctrines of Meir Kahane, who on February 24, 1994 opened fire inside the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, killing 29 people and injuring at least 100.
- The neo-Nazi David Copeland, who became known as the "London nailbomber" after a 12-day bombing campaign in April 1999 aimed at London's black, Asian, and gay communities, killing three and injuring 129.
- John Allen Muhammad, who, along with his younger partner Lee Boyd Malvo, carried out the Beltway sniper attacks in October 2002, killing ten people and critically wounding three others in an apparent attempt to extort $10 million dollars.
- Theodore Kaczynski, also known as the "Unabomber", who attempted to fight against what he perceived as the evils of technological progress by engaging in an almost eighteen-year-long campaign of sending mail bombs to various people, killing three and wounding 29.
- Buford O. Furrow, Jr., a member of the white-supremacist group Aryan Nations, who on August 10 1999 attacked a Jewish daycare in Los Angeles, injuring five, and subsequently shot dead a Filipino American US Postal Service carrier.