Sharp County Sheriff Shane Russell said his deputies on Thursday arrested two people thought to be members of a fringe sovereign citizen group profiting off scams and trespassing to live "off-grid" since at least August.
In a statement posted on social media, Russell did not identify the man and woman arrested at the property off Arkansas 56 near Evening Shade, but claimed their arrest prevented "domestic terrorism." He said the man has used the name Saleem Yosiyah YisraEl.
No specific charges were listed in the statement, although Russell said authorities found evidence of what appeared to be financial scams through the U.S. Postal Service and the internet. The Sharp County jail's online inmate roster is offline.
The two were first spotted in August moving an RV and a trailer onto property that did not belong to them, Russell said. They told deputies serving notices of eviction they were sovereign citizens of the Moorish National Republic, providing fictitious legal documents that claimed the land as sovereign property from which they could not be made to leave, Russell said.
The Moorish sovereign citizen movement emerged in the 1990s as an offshoot of the wider anti-government sovereign citizen movement, whose members use arcane and baseless legal claims to assert that they, as individual citizens, are independent of and sovereign over federal and state governments, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center's Extremist Files.
The Moors assert that African Americans "constitute an elite class within American society with special rights and privileges that convey on them a sovereign immunity," the Southern Poverty Law Center's website says. Some of these Moorish sovereign citizens point to a fictitious 1787 treaty between the U.S. and Morocco that supposedly grants them immunity, the site goes on.
The site does not explicitly mention the Moorish National Republic, although it states that there are many groups under the ideology and no central leadership.
Over the months that Sharp County deputies carried out an investigation into the pair, they built a permanent structure, dug a septic line, installed solar panels and stockpiled water, Russell said in his statement. There were also multiple vehicles at the property, which authorities said had fictitious license plates related to the Moorish group.
During the investigation, authorities learned that members of the Moorish group have been known to "defend their ground" using violence and have been linked to violent offenses against police, Russell said. His statement didn't say that any weapons were located.
When authorities served a search warrant on Thursday and arrested the two, they seized items on the property, including envelopes containing several thousand dollars worth of the Iraqi dinar currency, Russell said.
Russell did not offer any explanation for why the two might want the Iraqi currency, but investment in the Iraqi dinar has been a recurring financial scam in the U.S. since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
In 2018, the U.S. Department of Justice convicted head officials of one of the nation's leading dinar exchanges of fraud after they said the men lied about the value of the currency.