In April 2024, an Idaho teenager was captured and accused of planning to kill churchgoers during services across his hometown in the appellation of the Islamic State group, authorities have said. Alexander Scott Mercurio, 18, from Coeur d’Alene, was apprehended as part of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force investigation, a day before prosecutors say he intended to carry out his attack.

He is charged with “attempting to provide material support and resources to ISIS,” according to a federal criminal complaint filed in Idaho. The FBI expressed he was actively planning to strike churches Sunday in Coeur d’Alene, a town 30 miles east of Spokane, Washington, operating “weapons, including knives, firearms, and fire,” a statement declared. The attack was timed to coincide with the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, investigators said.

According to a direct notice sent to an FBI “confidential human source,” mentioned in a lengthy affidavit affixed to the criminal complaint, Mercurio set out his project in detail. “Stop close by the church, equip the weapon(s) and storm the temple, destroy as many people as possible before they inevitably disperse/scatter, then steam the temple to the ground and flee the scene,” Mercurio allegedly reported. He said he would then replicate this for all 21 churches in the town, according to prosecutors.

As part of their examination, prosecutors said, FBI sources fulfilled with Mercurio in person and heard him say support for ISIS and outline his plan to hinder his father with a metal pipe and restrain him, then take his firearms and shoot a local church. “His plan grew more precise as he eventually recognised the church and date on which he intended to attack,” the affidavit said, adding that he had promised his allegiance to ISIS and said he was prepared to die while killing others on its behalf.

Law enforcement officers discovered an ISIS flag, butane canisters, lighters, handcuffs, a blade, a pipe and a machete at his house during his detention, as well as several firearms belonging to his father, which he allegedly intended to take. Mercurio also distributed ISIS propaganda online and discussed ways to keep the group financially as well as travelling to West Africa to help its functions there, the affidavit said.

The FBI stated it became aware of Mercurio during an inquiry into a fundraising network that uses cryptocurrency and other platforms to sustain ISIS in Syria and its Afghan affiliate ISIS Wilayat Khorasan, understood as ISIS-K. That investigation discovered that Mercurio and at least three other suspects who were not pinpointed in the documents were financially helping someone only referred to as “Individual 2” in Gaza, the Palestinian enclave that has met widespread destruction from six months of the Israel-Hamas war.

A joint intelligence bulletin published by the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the National Counterterrorism Center alerted of possible threats to public gatherings in the U.S. from lone wolf extremists motivated by last month’s ISIS-Khorasan (ISIS-K) attack on Moscow’s Crocus City Concert Hall and by later official ISIS messages calling for similar attacks in the U.S.

The unclassified bulletin, distributed to law enforcement, expressed intelligence agencies have identified “several possible signposts … indicating potential violence.”  The arrows included explicit conversation in online spaces of tactics linked with ISIS’s attack; a proliferation of violent extremist content Linked with ISIS’s attack, especially in English; and interest in attack guidance in online forums.