An Alabama neo-Nazi accused of trying to start a paramilitary unit to take out “high value targets” aimed to kill a journalist who once reported on him, according to law enforcement testimony obtained by the Guardian.

Aiden Daniel Cuevas allegedly used “coded talk” to tell an undercover officer in November 2024 that the journalist was a “pawn” that “needed to be taken off the board”.

The alleged exchange with the undercover officer was revealed by Chris Hluzek, a criminal investigator with the Huntsville police department assigned to an FBI joint terrorism taskforce, during his testimony at a January detention hearing.

He added that, when the undercover officer pressed Cuevas about whether he simply meant he wanted to dox or harass the journalist, he is said to have replied: “What good is harassing a pawn and not removing it?”

The Guardian is not naming the journalist at their request, given legitimate safety concerns.

Prosecutors asserted that, while he did not use the word “kill”, the meaning of Cuevas’ coded language was clear.

“What we have here is a foiled murder plot,” Jonathan Cross, an assistant US attorney for the northern district of Alabama, told the court, according to a transcript of the hearing.

The subject of a year-long undercover investigation, Cuevas was arrested in January after allegedly paying an undercover officer $1,500 for three fully automatic weapons and three Glock-style pistols with obliterated serial numbers. Andrew Cole Nary, an alleged co-conspirator said to have been present for the purchase, was also arrested.

Both were charged with conspiracy to traffic illegal firearms.

Researchers and journalists who track far-right movements have identified Cuevas as a member of the North Bama Brigade, a white supremacist group spun out of the 2119 Crew, a youth-oriented affiliate of the neo-Nazi active club movement. He was charged with felony trespassing and burglary of an industrial complex that includes a nuclear power plant alongside other members of the spin-off group last year.

Hluzek testified Cuevas founded the North Bama Brigade in 2023 and that Nary was also a member. He said Cuevas told the undercover officer, of his plans for the spin-off group, that “he wanted to take over North Alabama” and “establish different leaders in different communities”.

And, according to a federal criminal complaint, he also spoke to the undercover officer in June 2025 about obtaining paramilitary urban assault training for himself and others, including advanced instruction in taking out “high value targets”.

The journalist who Cuevas earlier said “needed to be taken off the board” had written about him and other young males involved in US white supremacist groups.

The case highlights concerns in the US and abroad over increasing efforts by far-right extremists to intimidate, and in some cases attack or endanger, members of the press who seek to cover them.

“They view journalists as enemies of the people, as part of the other,” said Jon Lewis, a researcher at the Program on Extremism at George Washington University. “The years-long campaign by the right to demonize and delegitimize the media inevitably has real world consequences. Right wing extremists also feel increasingly emboldened seeing allies in the [US] administration openly echo their extremist rhetoric.”

Last year, a joint study by the German Newspaper Publishers and Digital Publishers Association and the European Centre for Press and Media Freedom found that two-thirds of journalists who covered rightwing extremism in the states of Saxony and Thuringia said they have been subject to direct threats, ranging from physical attacks to the attempted, life-threatening sabotage of one reporter’s car.

In March, members of a Montréal-area neo-Nazi active club who the Canadian journalist, Rachel Gilmore, identified, showed up at a music venue where her boyfriend was performing to confront her about her reporting.

In the US, notorious Tennessee neo-Nazi leader, Sean Kauffmann, has in recent years organized efforts to intimidate journalists at the Southern Poverty Law Center publication Hatewatch by encouraging fellow extremists to send them antisemitic and racist slurs, videos of race-motivated mass murders and images of lynchings of Black men, the outlet reported. The Tennessee Active Club, which he leads, also circulated the home addresses of multiple journalists.

Another far-right Telegram channel, which the SPLC reported was run by a member of the US white supremacist group Patriot Front, targeted at least nine journalists by releasing information including their home addresses, phone numbers and photographs of them, leading to stalking and harassment in some cases.

One of those journalists, NewsChannel 5 Nashville’s Phil Williams, reported that Kai Liam Nix, the man behind the channel, sent him threats demanding the network air a white supremacist video.

“Obviously, what these acts are trying to do is intimidate you out of doing your job,” said Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University who studies political violence and social and political polarization in the US.

She noted that, beyond ideology, extremist groups, like cults, can be “attractive to people who are looking for more certainty, and who feel uncertain in their own life”.

“By virtue of being extreme, they create very clear boundaries of who’s in and who’s out, and so there’s a feeling of camaraderie, a feeling of belonging,” Mason added. “If a group like this provides such a crucial psychological benefit for you, you will do anything to protect that.”

While stressing that political violence remains extremely rare, she noted that spikes in incidents can be concerning because “there is a sort of tipping point. Once enough people are engaging in violence, then more and more people begin to believe it’s OK and more people are willing to use it.”

Cuevas, meanwhile, allegedly identified two other “pawns” he wanted “taken off the board”: a former North Bama Brigade associate whose relationship “soured” with the group and a man who the group believed was a government informant.

The criminal complaint alleges Cuevas was more explicit about his intentions for the weapons he tried to buy when referring to the suspected informant, saying they would be used to “take [him] out”.

Herman Johnson, an Alabama-based federal judge, ordered Cuevas and Nary be held in US marshals custody pending the outcome of their case, stating there is probable cause to believe they committed the alleged conspiracy to traffic guns. Online court records do not indicate whether either has entered a plea.

Hluzek, Cross and defense attorneys for Cuevas and Nary did not respond to requests for comment.