A former animal rights activist who was on the run from the FBI for more than seven years claims that he was offered a deal to inform on one of the organisation’s most wanted fugitives who was arrested this week in Wales.
Peter Young, 47, who now lives in Boulder, Colorado, went on the run after being indicted in 1998 over a string of fur farm raids across three states the previous year. He was jailed in the US for two years in 2005 after spending years hiding from the FBI in the UK.
He said the agency had since twice sought information from him about Daniel Andreas San Diego, 46, who has been on the FBI’s “most wanted terrorists” list for almost two decades for his alleged involvement in two office building bombings in San Francisco in 2003.
San Diego was arrested in Maenan, between Conwy and Betws-y-Coed, on Monday, with officers from the UK’s National Crime Agency and North Wales police acting on a request from the FBI.
The agency said he was an “animal rights extremist”, who is alleged to have been involved in two explosions on the campus of a San Francisco biotechnology firm in August 2003, and a bombing at a nutritional products company in the same city a month later.
The FBI said it considered him “armed and dangerous” and had offered a reward of up to $250,000 (£200,000) for information leading directly to his arrest.
Young said: “I’ve never met Daniel Andreas San Diego. I’ve never met anyone who’s met him.”
He continued: “Daniel Andreas San Diego is the longest-running animal rights fugitive in the history of the movement. I was number two, he beat my record. I was on the run for about seven-and-a-half years.
“In 2019 I got contacted by the FBI to come pick up some belongings they’d confiscated from my apartment when I was arrested back in 2005.”
By then, it had been 14 years since he was jailed, but Young agreed to travel out to Oakland, California – where San Diego was wanted.
Young said: “They wheeled out this pallet of stuff, and they did an inventory, and this whole thing was very businesslike and at the end, they said: ‘We want talk to you about Daniel Andreas San Diego, we want to know if you know where he is, and we basically want to make a deal with you.’”
“And at that point, I just ended the conversation,” he said.
Young said he “didn’t stick around to find out” what the FBI would offer him in return, adding: “I could only speculate they wanted to pay me money.
“I think the theory of the FBI is that there’s this underground railroad for activists, fugitives, and that is really not the case. It really just comes down to who you know, in terms of your supporters, [but] there is no underground network.”
Young said he thought it was unlikely that San Diego was assisted by any global network of likeminded activists.
“I don’t want to speculate,” he said. “I can only say that if that network existed, I would have found it. And so I can confidently say that network does not exist.”
While he did call on help from activist friends while on the run, he said it’s “no different than if you fall on financial hard times. Who do you call? You call the people you know.
“It’s almost a laughable idea to think of an underground network, because there’s only been, it’s really just me and him in terms of actual fugitives, so if there was an established network, who is it for?”
Young said he knew nothing – other than what he had read in the press – of San Diego’s life on the run. He did not know whether San Diego also had relationships, why he moved to Wales, who may have helped him evade capture, when he took on a new identity under the name of Danny Webb, or how he managed to make enough money to purchase the £425,000 house where he had been detained.
“I did not live like it appeared Daniel Andreas San Diego was living at the time of his arrest,” he said. “I never had a stable home for those entire seven years, I never had stable income. I subsisted largely off shoplifting if I was going to be honest, and it was always precarious. I never was financially stable, I was always on the move.
“I’m going to be following the case closely, I have been following his case since the beginning. I don’t want to speculate, but I feel very badly for his situation, and I’m hoping for a good outcome.”
