Terrorist Bombs: A Catalogue of Controversy

The bomb that ripped through the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee’s Santa Ana office Friday morning, killing its director, is the most violent incident yet in a string of terrorist bomb attacks in Orange County over the past 15 years.

Although bomb threats and minor explosions are not uncommon, a list of the 10 major attacks and planned attacks reads like a catalogue of the era’s political controversies.

Just last December, Planned Parenthood of Orange County’s Santa Ana office was firebombed in what police reported as the work of apparent opponents of abortion. A Molotov cocktail or similar device was thrown against the rear exterior wall of the 1801 N. Broadway office, causing superficial damage. A few weeks earlier, the words “fetal heartbeat lives” were engraved in the clinic’s wooden door, police said at the time.

In January, 1983, a small fire in an Anaheim bakery led firefighters to nine sophisticated pipe bombs, which were later removed by a sheriff’s bomb squad. The bombs’ removal prevented a blast that “would have blown up the whole building,” officials said at the time. Although the Armenian-American owners said the incident was probably not political, investigators said that they were looking into the possibility that it might have been connected to other politically motivated extortion attempts against local Armenians.

A bomb exploded at the Anaheim Convention Center in June, 1981, blowing out doors and windows at the facility, which was the site of a Turkish Folk Dance Troupe performance and subsequent Armenian National Committee demonstration.

A Mission Viejo home owned by a Nationalist Chinese family was bombed in July, 1980. The attack was one of four such bombings that authorities said were probably carried out by dissident Taiwanese in Southern California over a six-month period.

In November, 1977, four self-proclaimed “anti-imperialists” planned to bomb the district office of then state Sen. John Briggs (R-Fullerton). Although the plot was foiled only hours before being carried out, the revolutionaries were convicted of planning the attack and sentenced to federal prison.

Finally, student unrest in 1970 was believed to be the cause of five other Orange County bombings. The Stanford Research Institute in Irvine and the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station were both the targets of alleged anti-war protesters. And within an eight-month stretch, Bank of America branches in San Clemente, Placentia and at UC Irvine were firebombed.