If they are serious, they need to be arrested. If they sent them as a joke, they need to be arrested. Someone is using postcards to terrorize Marion County, Florida schools:
Investigators in Marion County, Fla., are searching for the author of nine postcards sent to different schools on the same day with the words ‘Jihad-Boom” and handwritten cartoons of a building apparently exploding with people inside.
Investigators on Monday released the postcards with the threatening drawings on them in hopes of generating leads in the case.
Officials said that the postcards are made up of various and traditional themes, and each one has a distinctive hand-drawn cartoon on it. Several of the threats arrived on postcards featuring Walt Disney World.
Detectives said the threat-maker crossed his or her No. 7s and attached a suffix to the address. Six of the nine postcards spell the word “Jihad” correctly, while the others are incorrect.
The U.S. Postal Service said that the postcards were all mailed to the schools from the Ocala-Gainesville mailing district before the sixth anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
6 News in Florida is following the story and they note that a $10,000 reward is being offered “to anyone who provides information which leads to the arrest and conviction of the person or persons responsible for using the postal service to mail the threatening postcards to schools.”
In a sense it’s not unexpected. Terrorists don’t have to do terrorism, just threaten it. And if this is the work of someone who is “joking,” that person is essentially a terrorist and needs to be locked up.
You can view the threatening post cards HERE.
UPDATE:
–More details from the National Terror Alert Response Center
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.