By Paul Elias
Associated Press
SAN FRANCISCO — In its quest to find a suspected domestic terrorist on the lam for a decade, the FBI on Friday began placing his image on billboards across the country.
The FBI announced Friday that images of Daniel Andreas San Diego will appear on electronic billboards from California to Massachusetts and along the border with Canada. San Diego’s image even appeared above Times Square on Friday, the FBI said.
Billboards in Oregon, Nevada and Florida will also feature San Diego’s image for a week.
San Diego was the first person suspected of domestic terrorism to be added to the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorist List in April 2009. He is charged with planting two bombs that exploded about an hour apart in the wee hours of Aug. 28, 2003, on the campus of a biotechnology company in Emeryville, Calif. He’s also accused of setting off another bomb at a nutritional products company in Pleasanton, Calif., a month later. Neither bombing injured anyone, but authorities said the second bomb at the biotechnology company was meant to harm first responders.
A group calling itself Revolutionary Cells-Animal Liberation Brigade claimed responsibility for the bombings, citing the companies’ ties to Huntington Life Science. Huntington has been a longtime target of animal rights extremists because of its work with experimental drugs and chemicals on animals under contract for pharmaceutical, cosmetic and other companies.
The FBI had San Diego under around-the-clock surveillance when investigators watched him park his car near downtown San Francisco on the afternoon of Oct. 6, 2003, and disappear into a transit station. The FBI hasn’t seen him since, though it says it has received numerous sightings of him around the globe.
Late last year, the FBI called on the public’s help in locating San Diego, 36, who was raised in an upper-middle class suburb of Marin County north of San Francisco.
His father, Edmund San Diego, was the city manager of Belvedere, a wealthy Marin County enclave. Edmund San Diego didn’t return a phone call Friday. He has declined to talk about his son in the past.
FBI spokesman Peter Lee said Friday that the billboard company Clear Channel donates its electronic billboards occasionally to help investigators track down fugitives. San Diego’s image will appear on dozens of billboards throughout the country for a week.
Lee said the billboards have helped the FBI nab about 60 suspects.
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