Charlottesville Police Arrest Teen Over Threats Against Non-Whites, Close Schools

WASHINGTON (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 23rd March, 2019) A 17-year-old has been arrested for threatening to harm unspecified ethnic groups at a high school in Charlottesville - a city in the US state of Virginia that gained notoriety for a deadly rally by white nationalists in 2017, the city police department announced in a press release on Friday.

"In the afternoon hours of Wednesday, March 20, 2019, the [police] department was alerted to an online threat containing biased-based language targeting specific ethnic groups within Charlottesville High School," the release stated. "As a result the Charlottesville Police Department has arrested and charged a 17-year-old male.

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The threat prompted the closure of all Charlottesville public schools on Thursday and Friday, the release said.

While the release offered few details, local media reported that a person claiming to be a student at Charlottesville High School warned white students to stay home so they could shoot dead non-white students in an act of "ethnic cleansing."

City leaders have worked to ease racial tensions in the city since a white nationalist rally in August 2017 descended into violence, with a white nationalist killing a counter-protester and injuring others when he drove into a crowd.