San Juan – The head of the FBI office in Puerto Rico said that a series of searches carried out Friday at homes and offices associated with a militant pro-independence group were aimed at averting a “potential terrorist attack.”
Luis Fraticelli said that an FBI investigation pointed to the possibility of bombings on the Caribbean island, which is a U.S. commonwealth.
FBI agents, some wearing gas masks and toting assault rifles, searched homes and businesses in San Juan, Trujillo Alto, San German, Mayagüez, Aguadilla and Isabela.
There were no reports of arrests.
The superintendent of Puerto Rico’s police, Pedro Toledo, and the commonwealth’s secretary of justice, Roberto Sanchez Ramos, both told reporters that they had no knowledge of the operation.
Fraticelli provided no details about what, if anything, his agents removed from the premises searched, but he did refer to a clash outside one location that involved FBI personnel using pepper spray against journalists.
He said that his agents were only trying “to protect the news media, the public and officials of the law who were serving a legal search warrant.”
Both the Puerto Rican journalists association and the island’s governor, Anibal Acevedo Vila, condemned the FBI’s actions in that incident.
As the FBI searches unfolded, pro-independence activists mounted a protest outside the U.S. federal court in San Juan.
Targeted in Friday’s operation were people associated with the Boricua Popular Army, better known as Los Macheteros (Cane-cutters), which is seeking independence for the Caribbean island.
The searches came a little more than four months after the Sept. 23 death of the group’s 72-year-old founder, Filiberto Ojeda Rios, in a confrontation with FBI agents at a farmhouse in the western Puerto Rican town of Hormigueros.
The FBI wanted Ojeda Rios in connection with the 1983 robbery of more than $7 million in cash from a Wells Fargo armored truck in Hartford, Connecticut. The robbery was classified by prosecutors as an act of domestic terrorism because the money was used to fund activities by the Macheteros.
Ojeda Rios was convicted in absentia for the heist, in which no one was killed, and sentenced to 55 years in prison. He had been on the run since 1990.
Though few in Puerto Rico support the cause of independence from the United States, many on the island were upset over the circumstances of Ojeda Rios’s death.
