Date=3/12/2002

Type=CORRESPONDENT REPORT

Title=CHICAGO CYANIDE ARREST (L-O)

Number=2-287476

Byline=MICHAEL LELAND

Dateline=CHICAGO

Internet=YES

Content=

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Intro: Police in Chicago are trying to find out more about a man they arrested a few days ago for hiding poisonous cyanide in the city's subway system. The 25-year-old man from (the state of) Wisconsin is a self-described domestic terrorist. Officials in his home state have been looking for him for months. More from V-O-A's Michael Leland.

Text: On Monday, federal officials charged Joseph Konopka with possession of a chemical weapon. He was carrying a vial of cyanide when he was arrested with a juvenile late Saturday night in a steam tunnel on the University of Illinois-Chicago campus. That campus sits alongside the opening to a Chicago subway tunnel, and Mr. Konopka admitted to storing more cyanide in a Chicago Transit Authority storage room beneath a downtown subway station.

U-S attorney Patrick Fitzgerald says police recovered about half a kilogram of powdered cyanide.

/// FITZGERALD ACT ///

He should not have had a pound (half a kilogram) of cyanide. He was not working with cyanide. That is a crime in itself, if you do not have a lawful reason to have cyanide. Because cyanide is a dangerous chemical, that is why it is a crime, that is why we arrested him and that is why we charged him.

/// END ACT ///

Mr. Konopka is a former computer worker from northern Wisconsin. He says he is the leader of a group known as the "Realm of Chaos." It has attacked power stations, cellular phone towers and radio towers in Wisconsin. Officials say damage from those attacks has been in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. A sheriff's investigator in Door County, Wisconsin, Terry Vogel, says Mr. Konopka is intelligent and has committed vandalism with chemicals in the past.

/// VOGEL ACT ///

He would put one chemical in a bag filled with another chemical. He would snap them together, throw them in certain areas and they would mix together and within a short period of time they would explode.

/// END ACT ///

Officials in Wisconsin say Mr. Konopka disappeared last year after being charged with vandalism. He has apparently been living recently in Chicago's subway tunnels. Police in Chicago say the materials Mr. Konopka stored in the subway could have caused injury or death if they had been combined with other substances to create a toxic gas. But, they say, the public was in no danger.

But Mr. Vogel in Door County, Wisconsin says he believes Mr. Konopka was planning something serious. /// OPT /// Mr. Konopka has a court hearing scheduled for Wednesday. /// END OPT /// (signed)

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