ASHEVILLE, N.C. - A North Carolina man was convicted Friday of a charge he anonymously threatened to lynch a Muslim-American man who ran for a state Senate seat in Virginia, federal prosecutors said. Vandevere, whose trial started Thursday, was charged in June with interstate communication of a threat to injure a person in connection with a tweet directed at candidate Qasim Rashid. Rashid, a Democrat, lost his Nov. 5 bid to defeat an incumbent Republican state senator in Virginia. An “open source search” using Vandevere’s telephone number linked him to the same Twitter account — with the handle “DaDUTCHMAN5” — that posted the threat against Rashid, according to the affidavit. The post was accompanied by a black-and-white photograph of the infamous 1915 lynching of a Jewish man, Leo Frank, in Marietta, Georgia.

Source: thestar December 06, 2019 20:48 UTC