Accused Canadian Neo-Nazi Soldier Who Went AWOL Was Smuggled Into U.S.
Missing Canadian soldier and accused neo-Nazi recruiter Patrik Mathews. Image by Roseau County Sheriff
By Aiden Pink December 6, 2019
A disgraced Canadian soldier who went missing after being accused of being a recruiter for a neo-Nazi cell was smuggled into the United States and is being hidden by group members there, Vice reported Thursday.
Master Cpl. Patrik Mathews, an explosives expert, went missing in August after an undercover reporter with the Winnipeg Free Press exposed his work on behalf of the neo-Nazi group “The Base,” leading the Canadian military to begin the process of firing him. His abandoned car was found less than 10 miles from the American border.
Mathews has not been charged with any crimes, but the sheriff of the Minnesota county closest to the abandoned car issued a statement warning citizens not to approach him.
Base propaganda claims that they intend to start a “race war” leading to a white-only state. The group was believed to mostly limit their activities to cyberspace, but that appears to be changing. According to Vice, Mathews taught helped train around a dozen members at a combat training camp in Georgia this fall. And last month, the FBI arrested a New Jersey-based member of the group and accused him of recruiting volunteers to vandalize synagogues in Michigan and Wisconsin.
Aiden Pink is the deputy news editor of the Forward. Contact him at pink@forward.com or follow him on Twitter @aidenpink
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
