Daniel Andreas San Diego: Will jailed FBI’s Most Wanted animal rights activist be returned to the US?
Animal rights activist Daniel Andreas San Diego is fighting U.K. extradition to the United States on federal charges for three political bombings as a member of the Animal Liberation Brigade, which injured no one. The attacks were carried out twenty-two years ago in opposition to animal testing by Huntington Life Sciences. If extradited and convicted in the US, he could face 90 years behind bars, a potential life sentence.
THE GUARDIAN: Twenty-two years ago, a dark-haired, bespectacled young man vanished off the streets of San Francisco. Daniel Andreas San Diego, a 25-year-old information technology specialist, die-hard vegan and animal rights activist, was the FBI’s main suspect in a series of pipe bombings that exploded in front of the headquarters of Chiron Corporation and Shaklee Corporation, two Bay Area companies, in August and September of 2003.
Communiques attributed to the Revolutionary Cells – Animal Liberation Brigade were posted to the website of an animal rights magazine, claiming the attacks were carried out to highlight both firms’ alleged work with Huntingdon Life Sciences, a British research company that conducted tests for pharmaceutical, biotechnology and other chemical companies and had drawn the ire of activists on both sides of the Atlantic opposing its tests on animals.
In early September of this year, San Diego stood in a plexiglass dock at Westminster magistrate’s court in London, wearing a white button-down shirt and slacks, and guarded by several correctional officers. Now 47 years old, his hair is graying and his face has more wrinkles than the mugshots of a beaming, earringed young man the FBI disseminated during their 21-year search for him.
San Diego is fighting extradition to the United States on federal charges for the three political bombings, which injured no one. If extradited and convicted in the US, he could face 90 years behind bars, a potential life sentence. Armed with some of the UK’s most formidable human rights barristers, he has turned his extradition fight into a courtroom referendum on the compromised state of American justice under Donald Trump. Per his case docket in the northern district of California, San Diego does not have an attorney of record and has not entered a plea in his case…
“The era in which this case arose almost seems quaint, looking back,” said Ben Rosenfeld, a civil rights attorney, who has represented clients involved in animal rights and environmental direct action. Since then, the government’s response has only intensified, he argues: “People are being attacked, detained and deported – if they’re lucky – almost for nothing, for political viewpoints and opinions and expressions that the government finds distasteful.” ALI WINSTON
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