A 32-year-old Indian-origin man and a former graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison was arrested in Detroit for threatening nine members, including professors at his alma mater, warning them that he planned to hide the flesh of their children in burger meat, media reports said.
Federal agents arrested Arvin Raj Mathur on Friday at Detroit Metropolitan Airport and is being temporarily held without bond, The Detroit News reported. Mathur was in Michigan’s St. Clair County Jail on Sunday following his arrest after he traveled from Copenhagen, where he was enrolled at a university, the report said.
He is currently scheduled for a court hearing on Tuesday, it said.
Mathur, a former graduate student in the Department of Anthropology, is charged with interstate or foreign threat to injure after authorities said he emailed threats from outside the US to nine Wisconsin residents, according to court records.
He made an initial appearance in federal court in Detroit on Saturday.
Among those emails was one to an anthropology professor saying that two of the other people he had threatened should “sue me right away,” authorities said.
“Otherwise, I will murder their children. Call the police and a lawyer, otherwise, I will kill their children and hide their flesh inside of their burger meat,” he added in the email, according to court records.
Authorities have accused him of sending another email to an assistant professor with the Wisconsin college’s anthropology department with the subject line, “We are going to kill your daughters.” That person told officials that “he found the email disturbing and he was scared for his family’s safety,” the report said.
Police in Wisconsin obtained Mathur’s Gmail address from the University of Wisconsin-Madison database, it said.
The address matched the one used to send three emails to other victims last month, according to the investigator, it added.
“Mr. Mathur is presumed innocent, and we’ll await future proceedings to comment further,” his defense lawyer, Amanda Bashi, wrote in an email to The Detroit News.
