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2 charged with assaulting officers in Capitol attack

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WASHINGTON: The US Justice Department on Monday charged two men with pepper-spraying three Capitol Police officers, one of whom later died, during the January 6 assault on Congress by Donald Trump supporters trying to overturn his election defeat.


Julian Elie Khater and George Pierre Tanios are facing multiple counts, including assaulting police with a deadly weapon, after investigators said they sprayed at least three officers with an unidentified, but powerful, chemical agent.


One of those officers, Brian Sicknick, was later rushed to a hospital and died the next day.


Khater and Tanios are not charged with killing Sicknick, whose cause of death remains unclear. A law enforcement source familiar with the matter said it is still too early in the probe to know if Tanios or Khater directly bear any responsibility for Sicknick’s death.


According to the complaint, the FBI said the two men “appeared to time the deployment of chemical substances to coincide with other rioters’ efforts to forcibly remove the bike rack barriers that were preventing the rioters from moving closer to the Capitol building.”


Khater, 32, of State College, Pennsylvania, was arrested as he disembarked from an airplane at Newark Airport in New Jersey. Tanios, 39, of Morgantown, West Virginia, was arrested at his residence in West Virginia.


The two men grew up together in New Jersey, according to the criminal complaint.


— Reuters


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