Accused of laxity in the face of attacks against anti-abortion structures, the American federal police offered Thursday rewards for any information allowing the identification of the perpetrators of such acts.
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The FBI said in a statement offering up to $ 25,000 for information on acts of vandalism or arson having targeted, since the spring, a dozen family or religious associations which try to dissuade women from abort.
The bonus also concerns the throwing of a Molotov cocktail at a clinic practicing abortions in California.
These awards “reflect the FBI’s determination to vigorously investigate” all of these cases, said its director Christopher Wray, promising to “prosecute all those who hide behind extremist views to justify criminal acts”.
These acts of vandalism, which did not cause any victims, were recorded after the leak, on May 2, of a judgment of the Supreme Court of the United States which dynamited the right to abortion in the country.
Since then, the conservatives claim to have noted an upsurge in attacks against the structures of opponents of abortion and they accuse the authorities of not taking them as seriously as the violence against clinics practicing abortions.
Last week, Republican lawmakers in the House of Representatives passed a resolution blaming “the Biden administration for failing to take action to respond to these sweeping attacks.”
In the 1980s, the opponents of abortions had developed shock methods, chaining themselves in particular to the gates of clinics, so that the legislators had adopted in 1994 a law penalizing any act of intimidation or violence around these structures.
Since 1977, there have been 11 murders, 42 bombings and 196 arson attacks directed against patients, doctors, volunteers or clinics performing abortions, according to the National Abortion Federation, which records such violence.