A teenager in suburban Chicago was arrested before carrying out what was planned to be a mass shooting at a Hindu temple last weekend, officials said on Thursday.
Police officials in Palatine, Ill., and F.B.I. investigators said in a news conference that they believed the suspect, Alexandros Paporakis, 19, intended to attack a large Hindu temple in Aurora, about 40 miles west of Chicago.
Officials did not name the exact location of the target, but the Sri Venkateswara Swami (Balaji) Temple in Aurora informed members of a security threat with a posting on its website. When reached by phone, a receptionist who did not give her name confirmed the temple had been the site of the thwarted attack. Temple trustees declined to comment.
In Mr. Paporakis’s home, where he has lived with his mother for about a year, the police found a rifle, loaded magazines, hundreds of rounds of ammunition and tactical gear in his bedroom, officials said.
Investigators also found items with Nazi symbols, including swastikas, and a gas can labeled with an anti-Indian slur, according to court documents.
The arrest added to concerns about a recent rise in physical and verbal attacks against South Asians in the United States.
This month, a Hindu temple outside Cleveland was vandalized with a brick thrown through a window. In September, the Department of Homeland Security was criticized over a message it posted on social media, since taken down, urging some immigrants to self-deport and using an image of a Sikh man. Still, the department called criticism of the post “nonsensical drivel.”
Also in September, a Republican candidate for statewide office in Texas was denounced by many officials after mocking a photo of students at a University of Texas football game who appeared to be of South Asian heritage.
Mr. Paporakis has been charged with making a terrorist threat and unlawfully possessing weapons, both of which are felonies. It was unclear whether he had entered a plea. Public defenders assigned to Mr. Paporakis’s case did not respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Paporakis’s mother was questioned, but was not cooperating with the investigation, officials said at the news conference. A woman who answered a phone number listed under Mr. Paporaki’s address hung up when asked for comment.
Mr. Paporakis’s car was seen in the temple parking lot on Sunday for about 15 minutes, said Josh Hester, commander of investigations for Palatine’s police department.
Mr. Paporakis, a cashier at a Taco Bell, had texted a co-worker espousing white supremacist views and a plot for a potential mass shooting, court documents said. On Sunday, he called the co-worker to say that his gun had jammed at the scene and that he was fleeing, the documents said.
Mr. Paporakis also sent his co-worker a video showing how his gun, an AR-style rifle, had failed to fire, the court documents said. They also said that he told the co-worker he was trying to fix the gun so he could “retry” and that “the man that he fired at was ‘certainly saved by his God today.’”
The co-worker called 911, leading to Mr. Paporakis’s arrest.
Mr. Paporakis would discuss Nazis and violence at work, and “regularly made disparaging comments” about people of different races, including people from India, court documents said.
The manager and employees at the Taco Bell where Mr. Paporakis worked declined to comment, citing store policy, and directed questions to the owner, who could not be reached.
But according to the court documents, his colleagues said on Saturday that Mr. Paporakis’s behavior had intensified, and that he told one colleague “he couldn’t wait to kill Indian people” and talked to another about how he was planning “it” at a Hindu temple in Aurora.
Mr. Paporakis also told that colleague that Sunday would be “a special day,” the documents said.
Court documents said that Mr. Paporakis had written to a co-worker that he had been planning an attack for two years, homing in on the specific location in recent months. He described his persona as a working college student as a facade that concealed interior hatefulness and frequent fantasies about mass murder, the documents said.
Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi, a Democrat who represents Chicago’s northwest suburbs, said in a phone interview that he and his family had been at the Aurora temple at the time when Mr. Paporakis was there. They were celebrating the start of the Hindu holiday Navaratri, Mr. Krishnamoorthi said.
“Only later on did we learn that there was an attacker lying in wait in the parking lot and that apparently his AR-15 had jammed, preventing a massacre,” he said.
He added that the news came as a shock, but not a surprise, citing a “scourge of anti-Indian American, anti-South Asian hate” growing online.
Kim Bellware contributed reported. Susan C. Beachy contributed research.
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