Attack Starts Small Fire at Abortion Clinic

A container of flammable liquid was hurled through a window of a North Hollywood abortion clinic Friday and set off a small fire.

The Family Planning Associates Medical Group clinic in the 12900 block of Victory Boulevard was the target of the 3:48 a.m. attack, authorities said.

The fire caused $500 damage to the building and $500 to its contents, the Los Angeles City Fire Department said. No injuries were reported.

Clinic operators declined to discuss the incident and it was unclear whether the attack had any effect on its activities Friday.

No arrests were made in connection with the fire. Authorities detained one man after the incident but he was released after being questioned.

Jim Adamcik, assistant special agent in charge of the Los Angeles division of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, said investigators from his agency are heading the probe, aided by the FBI, the Los Angeles Police Department’s Criminal Conspiracy Division and the Los Angeles City Fire Department’s arson unit.

Attacks on Southern California abortion clinics “are not widespread and it’s not at epidemic stages,” Adamcik said. “It is, however, something we’ll always be concerned about because of the national significance.

“There will always be a full-scale investigation on fires, bombings or damage to abortion clinics.”

He added that investigators have not determined whether Friday’s incident in North Hollywood was related to attacks on abortion clinics in San Diego, San Luis Obispo and Newport Beach in the last several years.

Although the North Hollywood clinic has been the site of several protests by antiabortion groups over the last 12 years, violent attacks on clinics in the San Fernando Valley have been rare. A doctor at a Van Nuys clinic who sought a court order against protesters in 1993 alleged in a complaint that protester broke a clinic window and poured in acid and set the building afire.

A burglar alarm went off at the North Hollywood clinic Friday morning and LAPD officers who had been patrolling just a block away went to the scene. “They immediately saw smoke coming from a broken window in the front of the clinic,” Adamcik said.

By the time firetrucks arrived, the fire had gone out by itself, a Fire Department spokesman said.

Adamcik said that a flammable liquid was thrown through the window and that evidence retrieved from the scene has been sent to a Los Angeles Fire Department laboratory to determine what it was. He added that there may have been a container involved that will be processed for fingerprints.

In the last decade, several other Family Planning Associates Medical Group clinics in Southern California have been targeted by demonstrators and assailants.

A member of a conservative religious congregation was arrested in July 1987 after he allegedly planted a bomb at one of the group’s clinics in San Diego. At least 242 people were arrested in April 1990 after a violence-marred, seven-hour siege by abortion protesters at a group clinic in Los Angeles.

And in May 1995, a Superior Court judge in Westminster issued a preliminary order prohibiting antiabortion protesters at the group’s clinic in Orange from using a bullhorn, trespassing or blocking access to the clinic in response to a suit filed by the group.