Environmentalist charged with teaching arson in San Diego

In an indictment unsealed Wednesday, prosecutors said Rodney A. Coronado gave the lecture 15 hours after a $50 million fire destroyed a massive apartment complex in a north San Diego neighborhood. The indictment, however, does not link Coronado to that fire.

Coronado, 39, was arrested Wednesday in Tucson, Ariz., on a charge of distribution of information relating to explosives, destructive devices and weapons of mass destruction. He will be arraigned there Thursday.

Defense attorney R. Antonio Felix of Tucson, Ariz., did not return a message left seeking comment.

Coronado previously served four years in federal prison for a 1992 blaze at a Michigan animal research facility.

Daniel Dzwilewski, special agent in charge of the San Diego FBI office, alleged that Coronado was a national leader of the radical Earth Liberation Front. ELF is an underground movement with no public leadership, membership or spokesperson, according to its Web site. An e-mail sent to the Web site didn't elicit an immediate response.

The 2003 fire destroyed a five-story, 206-unit apartment complex, an underground parking garage and a construction crane in the University City area of San Diego. No one was injured.

A 12-foot banner found at the scene read "If you build it, we will burn it" with the initials of the ELF. The group, which only communicates with the news media by e-mail, issued a brief statement in response to media inquiries, saying the banner "is a legitimate claim of responsibility by the Earth Liberation Front."

Coronado's subsequent talk covered animal rights and militant environmental activism. According to an account and photos of the speech posted on the Internet, Coronado demonstrated how to build a crude ignition device using a plastic jug filled with gasoline and oil. Three animal rights activists who attended the lecture were ordered jailed for contempt for their refusal to testify before a grand jury investigating the fire.

While he repeatedly insisted that he had no role in the arson, Coronado has said he sympathized with the arsonists. Describing himself as an unofficial ELF spokesman, Coronado told The Associated Press at the time that young activists are "doing the only thing they know to do and that is strike a match and draw a whole lot of attention to their dissatisfaction with protecting the environment."

Authorities said the charge on which Coronado was indicted has only been used four times since it was written in 1997, most recently in an Ohio case unsealed Tuesday against three men charged with attempting to wage terror attacks against the United States. The charge carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison.

Coronado was previously sentenced to nearly five years in prison for a crime in which he said he did not participate: the 1992 firebombing of a Michigan State University laboratory and the offices of two animal researchers that caused $1.2 million in damage.

In December, a federal jury in Tucson, Ariz., convicted Coronado of illegally entering the Sabino Canyon Recreation Area to interfere with efforts to trap and relocate mountain lions following public sightings. He faces up to 7 1/2 years in prison when he's sentenced in March. That indictment called Coronado a member of Earth First!, perhaps best known for forest protests aimed at halting logging.