Everything we know about 5 adults who trained kids to carry out school shootings

Bail has been set for the five adults who kept two dozen children hostage in a dirty New Mexico compound to train them to use firearms to commit school shootings and other anti-government missions, and it's just $20,000 each.

Siraj Ibn Wahhaj, the Georgia father of a missing boy, and four other adults who were arrested last week on child abuse charges were conducting weapons training at his compound near the Colorado border, according to the Associated Press. They had been in the compound since around January 2018. Wahhaj might remain in jail while the four others are released on house arrest as early as Tuesday, since there is a warrant for his arrest in Georgia on accusations that he abducted his son.

State Judge Sarah Backus also ordered the five defendants to wear ankle monitors, have weekly meetings with their attorneys, not consume alcohol, and have no firearms, the AP reported.

Just more than a week ago, police raided the compound in New Mexico where the adults were keeping 11 children between the ages of 1 and 15 in dangerous conditions. The children were found hungry and dirty, and placed in state custody, and the adults were arrested. The remains of one boy were also found on the property. While investigators haven’t confirmed who the boy was, two of the children told investigators it was Wahhaj’s disabled son. They said they were told he would be resurrected as Jesus and instruct them on what corrupt institutions to attack, according to NBC News reporter Gadi Schwartz.

Wahhaj is the son of a Brooklyn imam who was an unindicted co-conspirator in a terrorist plot to bomb New York City in 1993, and his own 3-year-old son has been missing since he took him from his son’s mother in Jonesboro, Georgia, in December, the AP reported. Wahhaj’s son wasn’t found among the 11 children, but further information on the remains of the 12th child hasn’t been released.

When Wahhaj and the other four adults were found in their compound, they were “heavily armed with an AR-15 rifle, five loaded 30-round magazines, and four loaded pistols, including one in his pocket when he was taken down,” Taos County Sheriff Jerry Hogrefe said, which prosecutors used to argue that the adults were dangerous.

But Tom Clark, the attorney representing Siraj Ibn Wahhaj, said Wahhaj had permits for his weapons and no criminal record. He argued that prosecutors were holding him to an unusual standard because of his client’s race and Muslim faith.

“They are black and they are Muslim,” Clark said, according to the AP. “If these were white people of Christian faith who owned guns, it’s not a big deal. … But they look different and they worship different than the rest of us.”

Prosecutors denied that they were being discriminatory, and said the adults were dangerous and violent.

“This was not a camping trip and this was not a simple homestead of the kind that many people do in New Mexico,” Deputy District Attorney Timothy Hasson said, according to the AP. But the judge said the prosecutors failed to articulate any specific threats.

“What I’ve heard here today is troubling, definitely,” Judge Backus said, according to the AP. “Troubling facts about numerous children in far from ideal circumstances and individuals who are living in a very unconventional way.”

Cover: Defendants, from left, Jany Leveille, Lucas Morton, Siraj Wahhaj and Subbannah Wahhaj enter district court in Taos, N.M., for a detention hearing, Monday, Aug. 13, 2018. Several defendants have been charged with child abuse stemming from the alleged neglect of 11 children found living on a squalid compound on the outskirts of tiny Amalia, New Mexico. (Roberto E. Rosales/The Albuquerque Journal via AP, Pool)