From his detached home in West Palm Beach, Nicolas Atwood runs a website which last month urged violence on all staff and students at Oxford over plans for an animal research laboratory.

Last week the site circulated a list of 40 named academics and their home addresses, saying that they were “legitimate targets”.

Describing some as “scum”, it told animal rights activists they had “everything to gain by hitting these targets hard”.

Atwood’s website is used as the main forum for the Animal Liberation Front (ALF). It lists and glorifies successful attacks including arson, burglary and criminal damage on the workplaces and homes of scientists and associated workers.

Atwood, a management postgraduate with a criminal record for animal rights activity, has been behind the Bite Back group and allied website for at least three years.

British police say they are powerless to act because he is an American citizen living in the US and his website is administered in Malaysia.

He has gone to exceptional lengths to mask his identity, removing any reference to his name or home address when he registered the website and managing it via the Far East. On another linked website, he uses an alias and his parents’ address.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) confirmed last week it was aware of Atwood’s activities but cited the US first amendment which guarantees free speech unless there is direct evidence of an imminent attack.

One key target for Atwood’s Bite Back group is Oxford’s planned £20m medical research laboratory where work re-started late last year. The multi-million pound security operation is being underwritten by the government.

Last month the website carried a message from the ALF calling for attacks against Oxford staff and students, and telling sympathisers: “Do whatever it takes and blow these f****** monsters off the face of the earth.”

Atwood, originally from Chaska, Minnesota, is believed to have previously travelled to Britain and met Greg Avery, a leader of a campaign which aims
to close Cambridgeshire-based Huntingdon Life Sciences over its use of laboratory animals.

Atwood finished a postgraduate management course at New York University, before moving to Florida where he worked promoting the arts for a Palm Beach cultural council. He has animal rights-related convictions dating back to 1997 for offences including criminal damage, and previously wrote an article for an animal rights website praising “actions” by ALF members as “dynamic and inspirational”.

Atwood sells an animal rights magazine though his website, and last March set up a Florida company, Bite Back Inc. The name is believed to relate to “Operation Bite Back”, a 1990s arson campaign aimed at the American fur industry.

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