Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn on Tuesday unsealed a… indictment for a major felony against the 20-year-old who is said to be the leader of a violent Eastern European skinhead gang involved in numerous assaults and attacks abroad, some of them fatal. The gang, Maniac Murder Cult (or MKY), is linked to the com/764 paedophile ring, with at least one murder in Romania directly linked to MKY.
On July 6, Michail Chkhikvishvili, also known as “Butcher Commander,” “Michael,” and “Mishka,” was arrested in Chisinau, Moldova, on an Interpol warrant for allegedly conspiring to solicit attacks against homeless people, Jews, and other racial minorities in New York City; distributing instructions for making explosives; and making violent threats in online conversations with an undercover FBI employee. According to prosecutors, one of the plots he hatched with the undercover FBI agent involved poisoning Jewish children by handing out tainted candy while dressed as Santa Claus on New Year’s Eve 2023.
Chkhikvishvili, who remains detained in Moldova (which has previously cooperated with the United States in extraditing foreigners), has not yet been extradited to the United States or made his first court appearance. He has not yet been assigned a lawyer. If convicted, he could face decades in a U.S. prison.
Federal prosecutors allege Chkhikvishvili tried to goad the undercover agent into carrying out additional attacks with knives or Molotov cocktails, and claimed the planned attack would be a “bigger action than Breivik,” referring to Anders Breivik, the mass murdered Norwegian neo-Nazi who killed 77 people in 2011.
According to the FBI, MKY adheres to a “neo-Nazi accelerationist ideology and promotes violence and violent acts against racial minorities, the Jewish community, and other groups it deems “undesirable.” Like other accelerationist militants such as Atomwaffen Division and BaseMKY seeks to destabilize society through violence and terrorism. It was founded in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro by Yegor Krasnov and is blamed for many murders and assaults in both Russia and Ukraine. On their Telegram channels, MKY members glorified violence in person and distributed guides on how to commit violent assaults and shootings, cause maximum harm to victims, and how perpetrators could cover their tracks. Committing and documenting such an attack is the criterion for admission into MKY.
Courtesy of the Department of Justice
There are extensive links between MKY and 764. That alliance was developed by Butcher himself, particularly through contact with two 764 members who used the usernames “Xor” and “Kush,” both of whom remained unidentified. “Tobbz,” a troubled German youth who killed an elderly woman and stabbed a man in 2022, had also joined MKU, according to reports. Mirror and Tape recorder.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York is also prosecuting two related cases: the child abuse and CSAM distribution case against 764 member Angel Almeida, whose arrest in the fall of 2021 was the feds’ first look into the world of com, 764, and MKY; and the case against Nicholas Welker, the alleged former head of the neo-Nazi Feuerkrieg Division, who was convicted In April, Welker was arrested for threatening a Brooklyn journalist. According to court records, Welker and Chkhikvishvili were in contact from July 2022 to March 2023, when Welker was arrested and charged.
Chkhikvishvili, a Georgian citizen, was present in the United States in 2022, according to a sworn declaration by FBI Special Agent Erica Dobin of the New York City Joint Terrorism Task Force. U.S. authorities say he visited his girlfriend in California in March and April of that year, information the FBI learned after interviewing the young woman about her virulent neo-Nazi social media posts. Shortly afterward, Chkhikvishvili traveled to Brooklyn, where he stayed with his grandparents and worked at a rehabilitation center caring for an elderly Orthodox Jewish patient. “I’m working at a private rehab center with a Jewish family,” he texted another neo-Nazi in July 2022. “I’m getting paid to torture a dying Jew, I think I almost killed him today.” Chkhikvishvili sent several images of the patient to his fellow extremist. The patient died later that year, though the government does not allege Chkhikvishvili caused his death.
It is not clear when Chkhikvishvili left the United States. Federal prosecutors list his place of residence as Tbilisi, Georgia, although he was arrested in a Balkan country across the Black Sea.
According to prosecutors, in allegedly urging the undercover FBI agent to commit acts of violence and record them, Chkhikvishvili repeatedly emphasized the lethal level of violence MKY members employed in their attacks. “We murdered them in the RPG,” he allegedly wrote to another extremist while comparing MKY to another neo-Nazi group, referring to a “live-action RPG.” Even as he allegedly planned the mass poisoning plot with the undercover FBI agent, prosecutors say Chkhikvishvili did not shy away from the potential “heat” the undercover agent warned he would bring to MKY: “That’s exactly what we want,” he wrote in response.
