(Reuters) – A Wisconsin man was sentenced to over seven years in a federal prison on Wednesday for the 2022 firebombing of a conservative anti-abortion group’s office, the U.S. Department of Justice said.
Hridindu Sankar Roychowdhury, 29, pleaded guilty last December to the attack on Wisconsin Family Action’s office in Madison. The office was empty at the time and nobody was hurt.
In addition to his sentence of 90 months in prison, Roychowdhury was ordered to pay nearly $32,000 in restitution and will have three years of probation upon release, according to court documents. He had faced up to 20 years in prison.
Lawyers for Roychowdhury did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
Roychowdhury admitted to firebombing the office just days after a leaked draft of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling overturning the nationwide right to abortion became public.
Roychowdhury was arrested in March 2023 at an airport in Boston after authorities said DNA from a thrown-away bag containing a partially eaten burrito had helped them identify who caused the May 8 fire.
Prosecutors said that components of a Molotov cocktail were recovered. Outside the building, someone had spray painted “if abortions aren’t safe then you aren’t either.”
According to prosecutors, investigators recovered DNA from that Molotov cocktail, a building window and a lighter that matched Roychowdhury’s DNA.
(Reporting by Brad Brooks in Longmont, Colorado; Editing by Stephen Coates)
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