FL Man Made Threatening Call To World Jewish Congress In NY: U.S. DOJ

SARASOTA, FL — A Sarasota man was arrested after making a threatening phone call to the World Jewish Congress in New York City last month, according to a U.S. Department of Justice news release.

Deep Alpesh Kumar Patel, 21, was charged with transmitting an interstate threat to injure. If convicted, he faces a maximum sentence of five years in federal prison.

Patel left a threatening voicemail at the World Jewish Congress on Oct. 21.

In the message, he identified himself by name and screamed, among other expletives, “If I had a chance, I would kill every single one of you Israelis. Every single one of you! Cause mass genocide of every single Israeli.”

The organization was founded in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1936 three years after the Nazi rise to power and on the eve of the Holocaust. It’s the leading international organization that connects and protects Jewish communities globally, in more than 100 countries, according to its website.

Officers with the Sarasota Police Department went to Patel’s home on Oct. 24. When they asked if he knew why they were there, he said “that he believed that the interview was related to telephone calls that he had made,” according to the criminal complaint against him.

When investigators asked him to describe the calls he made, he said “that he.had called Jewish centers to express his family's anger with Israel for the genocide of the Palestinian people … (and) that he did not intend to scare or threaten anyone, but that he wanted to use the harshest language possible to convey his anger,” the complaint said.