On Sunday evening, around 100 individuals who had broken off from a protest in the South River Forest area southeast of Atlanta launched a violent attack on nearby police, The Post Millennial reports.
The officers were guarding a construction site for a future first responder training facility that members of the “Stop Cop City” Antifa affinity group sought to halt.
According to a statement by the Atlanta Police, “They changed into black clothing and entered the construction area and began to throw large rocks, bricks, Molotov cocktails, and fireworks at police officers.”
Surveillance footage shows some of the attackers dressed in military-style fatigues smashing up and setting fire to construction equipment after police retreated from the projectile attacks.
The attack lasted for about eight minutes.
Nearly two dozen suspects were arrested on suspicion of domestic terrorism.
According to DeKalb County jail records, “Atlanta Police confirmed they were charged.”
The majority of the suspects are from out-of-state and have white-collar backgrounds.
Two of the terror suspects are not from the U.S.
One suspect, Thomas Webb Jurgens, 28, is an attorney for the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a left-wing nonprofit organization that claims to monitor extremism in the U.S.
The SPLC has been embroiled in its own controversies, with former staff members accusing the organization of so-called systemic racism and sexism.
When contacted for comment, the SPLC’s spokesperson, Michael Edison Hayden, did not respond.
Hayden and the SPLC’s staff reportedly communicate frequently with Antifa accounts on Twitter in a friendly manner.
The extremist group has been involved in a series of violent attacks in recent months, including a deadly shooting in January that resulted in 19 of its members being charged with terror offenses thus far.
