The Bucharest Court of Appeal turned down on Tuesday the extradition request of the US authorities for a 17-year-old Romanian student accused of sending hundreds of bomb threats to institutions overseas and manipulating underage girls to engage in acts of extreme violence, sexual exploitation and self-mutilation.
The court also lifted the house arrest order issued against the defendant who had been subjected to this measure since January 21, 2025. The ruling can be appealed within 5 days, the Romanian court's decision states.
In December 2024, the teenager was put on internationally wanted list, based on an arrest warrant issued by a judge from the Southern District of New York for the following: conspiracy to commit crimes against the USA, sexual exploitation of a minor, receiving and distributing child pornography, sending interstate extortion threats, threatening interstate communications, threatening use of mass destruction weapons, threatening to commit international acts of terrorism.
According to the documents in the case, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other US and foreign law enforcement agencies have been investigating since September 2023 a global crime network that perpetrated its activities through certain online groups.
Among their publicly declared objectives are the collapse of the current world order and the destruction of civilized society by corrupting and exploiting the world's youth.
US judicial authorities maintain that the Romanian student is a member of such an online criminal group which targets, manipulates and extorts victims into committing acts of violence, submitting to sexual exploitation and performing self-mutilation.
Thus, through the lover boy method, the Romanian teen allegedly duped the minor victims into believing that they were in romantic relationships with him, then directed them to produce and share sexually explicit content and to engage in acts of violence, including serious self-harm and cruelty to animals.
If a victim refused to submit to his orders, the highschooler sent bomb threats to US institutions indicating the disobedient girl as the perpetrator. His record appears to run into several hundred false bomb threats against public institutions (synagogues, school districts, airports, hospitals and government buildings) located in the United States, including New York, as well as in several foreign countries, including the United Kingdom. After receiving the threats, the respective public institutions were evacuated or temporarily closed, causing significant disruption, panic, and financial loss.
Quizzed by Romanian and American authorities, the student admitted to the allegations against him, namely that he learned how to make phone calls through various internet applications and that he sent, starting in December 2022, over 450 bomb threats and/or threats to commit a mass armed attack at a school.
FBI agents interviewed six young victims of the Romanian student's manipulation and blackmailing schemes.
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