The 29-year-old man charged in connection with fires that burned down a paper products warehouse in California was allegedly motivated by anti-capitalism sentiment and compared himself to Luigi Mangione, authorities said Friday.
Chamel Abdulkarim, of Highland, California, was charged by federal authorities with arson of a building used in interstate and foreign commerce, Bill Essayli, the first assistant United States attorney, said at a news conference Friday morning.
Abdulkarim is accused of intentionally starting multiple fires at a 1.2 million-square-foot warehouse on Tuesday. The warehouse was located in Ontario, about 40 miles east of Los Angeles, and was owned by the consumer goods company Kimberly-Clark Corp.
Authorities have said Abdulkarim was an employee of NFI Industries, a third-party distribution company for Kimberly-Clark products.
Essayli said the charge carries a five year mandatory minimum federal prison sentence and is punishable by up to 20 years in prison.
There were at least 20 people at the warehouse when the fires began, authorities said, but no one has been reported injured.
Abdulkarim was also charged by the state of California with one count of aggravated arson and six additional counts of arson related to each fire he is accused of starting at the warehouse, Jason Anderson, the San Bernardino County district attorney, said at the news conference.
The first state charge carries the special circumstance of the damage from the arson reaching more than $10.1 million, Anderson said. That charge carries a penalty of 10 years to life. An initial estimate found the paper products inside the warehouse to be worth $500 million, with the building itself worth $150 million.
Abdulkarim is accused of filming himself setting fire to pallets of paper inside the Kimberly-Clark warehouse on Tuesday morning and posting the videos to social media, Essayli said.
“You could hear his voice repeating several times, ‘All you had to do was pay us enough to live,’” Essayli said, adding that the suspect appeared to be motivated by “hostility to capitalism and corporations.”
“The final video posted on Instagram showed the fire spreading throughout the warehouse and the defendant saying, ‘There goes your inventory,’” Essayli said.
The U.S. attorney said Abdulkarim allegedly sent a text message to a co-worker about an hour after the fire that read, “All you had to do was pay us enough to live. Pay us more of the value WE bring. Not corporate. Didn’t see the shareholders picking up a shift.”
Essayli said that in a phone call, Abdulkarim allegedly “compared himself to Luigi Mangione.”
Abdulkarim was expected to be arraigned on the state charges in court on Friday.
