A software engineer furious with the IRS launched a suicide attack on the US tax agency on Thursday by crashing his small plane into an office building containing nearly 200 Internal Revenue Service employees, setting off a raging fire that sent workers running for their lives. Emergency crews recovered two bodies from the wreckage. The pilot was presumed dead and one worker in the building had been missing.
The Austin Fire Department Battalion Chief Palmer Buck declined to discuss the identities of those found, but said authorities had "accounted for everybody". The FBI tentatively identified the pilot as A. Joseph Stack III, 53. Law enforcement officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because the investigation was still going on, said that before taking off, Mr Stack apparently set fire to his house and posted a long anti-government screed on the Web. It was dated Thursday and signed "Joe Stack (1956-2010)".
In it, the author cited run-ins he had with the IRS and ranted about the tax agency, government bailouts and corporate America's "thugs and plunderers". "I have had all I can stand," he wrote, adding: "I choose not to keep looking over my shoulder at `big brother' while he strips my carcass." *AP