JDL TERRORIST MURDERED IN PRISON

JDL activist linked to bomb plot killed in prison

A Jewish Defense League activist imprisoned for his role in a plot to bomb a California mosque and the office of a Lebanese-American congressman was killed at a federal prison in Phoenix, an FBI spokesman said Saturday. Earl Krugel, 62, was killed in an assault Friday evening at the Federal Correctional Institution, said FBI agent Richard Murray. Murray wouldn’t release further details but said federal authorities had opened a homicide investigation.

Krugel’s wife, Lola, said FBI investigators told her an inmate had struck her husband on the head from behind with a cement block. “Earl never saw it happening,” she said. “He was exercising.” He had been at the medium-security prison for three days, according to his sister Linda Krugel, also of Los Angeles. Earl Krugel, a former dental assistant from Los Angeles, and late JDL leader Irv Rubin were arrested in 2001 and charged with conspiring to bomb the King Fahd Mosque in Culver City and a field office of Republican Rep. Darrell E. Issa, who is Lebanese-American. Rubin died in 2002 after plunging 18 feet over a railing at a downtown jail in what authorities ruled a suicide.