Sai Varisth Kandula, a 20-year-old Indian national residing in US was sentenced to eight years of jail on Thursday for an attempted attack on the White House with rented truck .
According to the department of justice, the attack in May 2023 was aimed to overthrow President Joe Biden’s government and replace it with a dictatorship fuelled by Nazi ideology.
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According to news agency Associated Press, US District Judge Dabney Friedrich also sentenced Kandula to three years of supervised release after his prison term and ordered him to pay nearly $57,000 in restitution.
Defense attorney Scott Rosenblum said Kandula was suffering from schizophrenia and was overwhelmed by delusional thoughts, including his belief that “a reptilian race had installed a puppet regime to operate the US”
Kandula had told investigators that he would have “arranged for the killing of the US president and others if necessary to achieve his objective.” At the time of his arrest, he was flying a Nazi flag.
He had planned the attack for weeks before he took a flight from St. Louis to Washington, DC only hours before the crash, prosecutors said. He rented the truck in Herndon, Virginia approximately three hours before he crashed it into the barriers.
On May 4, 2023, Kandula attempted to contact several other companies in an attempt to rent a large commercial tractor-trailer truck, a dump truck, or another large truck. Kandula was unsuccessful in arraigning for security guards or a tractor-trailer truck or dump truck. Kandula had attempted to arrange for the services of these security guards and the use of large vehicles in order to carry out his offense against the US government, a media release said.
The truck nearly struck two people standing next to a park bench when he steered a U-Haul box truck onto a sidewalk and toward metal bollards that prevent vehicles from entering Lafayette Square, which is located north of the White House. He retrieved a Nazi flag from a backpack after the May 22, 2023, crash, which didn’t injure anybody.
According to department of justice, his actions caused USD 4,322 in damage to the National Park Service. This amount included costs for repairing the metal bollard barriers to their original condition and ensuring structural soundness, oil and chemical removal, spill cleanup, and disposal of fluids from the crashed U-Haul.
