White supremacist who opened fire at U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum 'has links to the BNP'

A white supremacist who killed a security guard after opening fire at Washington's Holocaust Museum had links to the far-Right British National Party, a former associate has said.

James von Brunn, described as a 'hard core neo-Nazi', attended meetings of the American Friends of the British National Party, which raised funds for the white supremacist group.

Todd Blodgett, a former Reagan White House Aide, attended meetings at the Arlington County branch of the group with von Brunn, he told the Washington Post.

He did not elaborate on how often von Brunn attended the meetings or whether he donated any funds to the party, which just this week saw the election of its first MEPs, including leader Nick Griffin.

Von Brunn fatally shot security guard Stephen T. Johns in the attack in the busy tourist attraction located just off the National Mall near the Washington Monument.

But before he could cause any more bloodshed, Brunn was critically injured himself in a gun battle with two other guards.

The quick action of the security guards was praised for preventing any further injuries at the museum, which was packed with 2,000 visitors at the time of the attack, including hundreds of schoolchildren.

The shooting comes just a week after President Obama visited the Buchenwald Concentration Camp in Germany during a trip to Europe.

Mr Obama said that he was 'saddened' by the shooting.

Brunn is said to have long-term ties to anti-Semitic and race hate groups in the US and served six years behind bars after walking into Washington's Federal Reserve building with a shotgun in a protest over interest rates in 1981.

US Park Police spokesman David Schlosser said the gunman walked into the museum at about 1pm armed with 'a long gun'.

He reportedly started shooting after security guards confronted him by the metal detectors at the entrance. All visitors have to pass through the detectors and bags are screened.

One eyewitness said she saw the injured security guard as she tried to flee from the gunfire.

'We were in the Remember the Children exhibit and we heard shooting.

'I ran out and I could see the shooter and the guard was laying on the floor with blood all around him,' she said.

Mark Lippert said he heard several 'pops' and saw several schoolchildren running towards him with horrified looks on their faces.

Brunn is well known to US watchdog groups monitoring white supremacy organisations.

It is not known how strong his links were to the American Friends of the BNP.

The group was headed by British expatriate Mark Cotterill. He has united a significant number of American extremist factions, all in the name of raising funds for the BNP, the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups, claimed in a 2001 report.

Searchlight magazine claimed the group channelled tens of thousands of dollars into the BNP before a change in UK electoral law made it illegal to raise money abroad.

Cotterill later left the group to form the England First Party, or EFP, in 2004, a rival to the BNP.

It is not known if von Brunn ever met Cotterill or Griffin, or for how long he attended meetings of the American Friends of the BNP.

He met regularly with Blodgett in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Blodgett worked as a paid informer for federal investigators in the early 2000s, he told the Washington Post.

He said he never filed reports on von Brunn to the FBI but that he was probably around while was wired.

'It's only an opinion, but my suspicion is that he was nearing the end of his life and he saw that Barack Obama was in the White House and he decided that America was going to hell in a handbasket and thought he would go out with a hell of a bang,' claimed Mark Potok, of the Southern Poverty Law Centre.

The suspect once tried to kidnap members of the Federal Reserve board, a 'caper' thwarted when a guard captured him outside a board meeting carrying a bag stuffed with weapons.

Von Brunn describes the assault with apparent pride on his website, the source of fulmination against Jews and races other than his own.

He was sentenced in 1983 to more than four years in prison for attempted armed kidnapping and other charges in his Fed assault. He was released in 1989.

'The subject resides in my memory like old road-kill,' he wrote. 'What could have been a slam-bang victory turned into ignoble failure. Recalling all of this presents an onerous task. I am getting near the end of the diving board.'

Despite the revolver, sawed-off shotgun and knife found in his bag that day, von Brunn insisted he was trying to place the board under 'legal, non-violent citizens-arrest.'

A self-described artist, advertising man and author living in Annapolis, Maryland, von Brunn wrote an anti-Semitic treatise, 'Kill the Best Gentiles,' that he said no one would publish.

He decries 'the browning of America' and claims to expose a Jewish conspiracy 'to destroy the White gene-pool.'

Von Brunn also wrote, 'The 'Holocaust' Religion is destroying Western Civilization. The Aryan gene-pool dies, 'unwept, unhonored and unsung.''

His lengthy, often rambling online biography aside, law enforcement officials are trying to piece together details of von Brunn's life.

Navy records show that he enlisted in 1942, accepted an appointment as a naval midshipman in the volunteer reserves in 1943, and served until 1956.

Two law enforcement officials said investigators are trying to better understand time he spent in Idaho, and how he acquired the .22-caliber rifle used in Wednesday's attack.

At the request of the U.S. Park Police, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives is tracing the weapon. Under federal law, convicted felons cannot purchase firearms.

A third law enforcement official said when von Brunn was captured he had a list he had made of lawmakers in the U.S. Congress. The purpose of the list was not immediately clear, the official said.

Public records show that in 2004 and 2005 he lived briefly in Hayden, Idaho, which for years was home to the Aryan Nations, a racist group run by neo-Nazi Richard Butler.

In his account of his 'Federal Reserve caper,' the St. Louis native relates his 'character shapers' - among them a schoolyard bully who beat him up, vacation days on the Mississippi River, his service on a PT boat in World War II, and what he said was his first trouble with the law - a year in jail for tussling with a sheriff on Maryland's Eastern Shore in 1968, the year he moved to the area from New York City.

Von Brunn applied to have his art shown at the Troika Gallery in Easton, Maryland, around the time the gallery opened about 12 years ago, two of the owners, Laura Era and Jennifer Wharton explained.

They said they turned him down because it was not up to their quality and that made von Brunn angry.

'He stomped out,' Wharton said. 'You don't normally get that reaction from artists.'

They say his work was not strange or violent, but the artists they show have many years of professional experience. They said von Brunn's work depicted images such as horses and buffalo in the American West or an eagle with the U.S. flag.

Von Brunn's accounts of what shaped his character as a boy and young man are heavy with dark episodes blamed on Jews and other minorities.

Daily Mail