Yonkers man who threatened to kill police during a St. Patrick’s Day parade arrested

An ISIS-obsessed New Yorker who threatened to kill police officers during a local St. Patrick’s Day Parade has been arrested, the FBI said Friday — as revelers across the country geared up to celebrate the often frenetic holiday.

Ridon Kola, 32, a resident of Yonkers, was arrested and charged with making interstate threats ahead of the city’s St. Patrick’s Day parade, scheduled for Saturday.

The charges carry a maximum sentence of five years in prison and come after Kola sent a message directly to the Yonkers Police Department social media accounts to detail his planned attack.

The threats came over the course of several days and were compounded by a series of disturbing posts on the alleged domestic terrorist’s own social media.

One such message, published just days after Kola sent the department a direct message to say he would “crucify” officers charged with overseeing the procession, included an image of the suspect brandishing an ax, apparently to fulfill his initial threat.

The arrest of the ISIS-obsessed New Yorker came as revelers across the country geared up to celebrate the often frenetic holiday, including at the famed NYC parade a few miles south.

The message was sent to the Yonkers Police Department on March 9 and saw Koala threateningly insist that the street where the event was to take place on Saturday will be a “horror scene,” before closing with an Arabic phrase meaning “God is great.”

“I will crucify the Yonkers agents and their bosses along McLean Avenue,” Kola wrote in the correspondence, which was released by the Justice Department shortly after his arrest.

“It’s going to be a horror scene,” the New Yorker continued, according to federal authorities. ‘Allahu Ekberr [sic].’

In another message sent that same day, Kola wrote, “The first people to be crucified are the Yonkers rats.”

While the post didn’t mention the parade directly, it did by proxy — with McLean as the street on which the city’s event will take place.

The planned event is considerably smaller than its famous counterpart in Manhattan, a few miles to the south, with a procession of about 150,000 and attended by about 2 million people.

That said, the Yonkers parade is no slouch and is still expected to welcome around 30,000 revelers.

Following Kola’s arrest, the mayor of Yonkers announced that the event would go ahead as planned, with safety a priority.

“The message is clear. It’s not funny,” Democrat Mike Spano said of the not-so-veiled threats from the currently-detained suspect, saying he “will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

“That’s what we do,” the mayor said of his community, 15 miles north of Manhattan. “That’s why this man won’t be at the parade. Safe to say. Everyone else who wants to enjoy the parade will be there.’

Hours earlier, the U.S. Attorney’s Office revealed they had arrested the Yonkers resident, while also detailing a series of since-deleted posts in which the suspect expressed support for the terror group, as well as a “war against non-Muslims.”

In a message quoted by the FBI, Kola showed support for fellow ISIS fanatic Sayfullo Saipov, 35, who was sentenced this week to life in prison for using a rented UHaul to plow eight people into a bike path in 2017. New York City.

“May Allah set you free, my brother,” Kola wrote in the post, written on March 7, according to a criminal complaint aired by the lawyer’s office.

The suspected terrorist added, “The real terrorists and thieves are the American Illuminati [sic]’

Other posts that have since been removed include Islamic artwork and imagery that the FBI says coincides with those used by jihadist groups to express their desire for an all-Islamic world — one of the Islamic State’s core tenets.

The complaint further revealed that Kola had sent threats to Yonkers Police Department social media as early as 2021, with one message, written in Albanian, reading, “I’m going to butcher you little girls.”