Statue of Liberty Bombing

On June 3, 1980, a bomb exploded in the museum at the base of the Statue of Liberty. Initially, at least five separate terrorist groups took responsibility, but within days the bombing was attributed to the Croatian Freedom Fighters.

The bomb, which was placed in a wooden exhibit case in the museum's Story Room, exploded at 7:25 p.m., an hour after the last ferry full of visitors left Liberty Island. Although a dozen residents and five workers were still on the island, no one was injured. The explosion damaged a large section of the room's ceiling, as well as some contents of the exhibit case, including a first publication of Emma Lazarus's poem “The New Colossus,” which includes the lines, “Give me your tired, your poor / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Damages exceeded $15,000.

The bombers left no note at the scene, and federal authorities had few initial leads. Within hours of the bombing, however, members of Omega 7, an anti-Castro terrorist group; the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional (FALN), a Puerto Rican independence group; the National Socialists, a Nazi group; the Jewish Defense League; and the Palestine Liberation Army had all contacted newspapers and authorities claiming responsibility and, in some cases, threatening more violence. Investigators suspected that Omega 7 was responsible because the group had cited Lazarus's poem in its protests related to immigration policies and a recent wave of Cuban refugees.

Two days later, however, The New York Times and NBC received letters from the Croatian Freedom Fighters, written in Croatian, taking responsibility for the bomb. The letters made no specific demands, but urged the worldwide community to recognize the plight of the people of Croatia, who had lost their autonomy to Yugoslavia in 1971. A similar letter had been sent to The Washington Post a day earlier, in which the Croatian Freedom Fighters had claimed responsibility for the June 3 bombing of the home of a Yugoslavian ambassador, Vladimir Sindjelic, in Washington, D.C., and had demanded for the creation of a Croatian state.

The Croatian Freedom Fighters had also been responsible for several other bombings in the New York area. In December 1979, the group bombed a Yugoslav-owned travel agency in Astoria, Queens, followed by a St. Patrick's Day bombing of a Yugoslav bank, Yugobanka, on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. The group also claimed responsibility for bombs at the United Nations and Grand Central Station in 1978. During the late 1970s, the FBI placed the Croatian Freedom Fighters among the top three most active militant foreign nationalist groups within the United States, along with the FALN and Omega 7.

The museum bombing was part of a series of political protests staged at the Statue of Liberty. In 1980, two men scaled the statue, using climbing equipment, to protest the treatment of a convict during a criminal trial in California. In 2000, activists protesting the U.S. bombing tests on the island of Vieques draped the statue in the Puerto Rican flag. After the closing of Liberty Island and the statue due to security concerns following the 9/11 attacks, they reopened in late 2001 and 2004, respectively. The Statue of Liberty's crown was reopened to the public with considerable fanfare on July 4, 2009.

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