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Two Students Arrested in Ala. Church Fires
Mar 08 12:52 PM US/Eastern
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By JAY REEVES
Associated Press Writer

BIRMINGHAM, Ala.

Two college students were arrested Wednesday and a third was being sought in a string of nine rural Alabama church arsons that allegedly were set first as "a joke" and later as a diversion, federal agents said.

Benjamin Nathan Moseley and Russell Lee Debusk Jr., both students at Birmingham-Southern College, appeared in federal court Wednesday and were ordered held on church arson charges pending a hearing Friday.

Matthew Lee Cloyd, described as a student at another Birmingham school, was being sought.

The arrests came in a probe of arsons at five Baptist churches in Bibb County south of Birmingham on Feb. 3 and four Baptist churches in west Alabama on Feb. 7. The federal Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agency had made the arsons its top priority, with scores of federal agents joining state and local officers.

An ATF affidavit said Moseley told agents on Wednesday that he, Cloyd and Debusk went to Bibb County in Cloyd's Toyota sport utility vehicle on Feb. 2 and set fire to five churches. A witness quoted Cloyd as saying Moseley did it "as a joke and it got out of hand," according to the affidavit.

Moseley also told agents the four church fires in west Alabama were set "as a diversion to throw investigators off," an attempt that "obviously did not work," the affidavit said.

Arson investigators scheduled an afternoon news conference at the Tuscaloosa airport to discuss the arrests.

A 10th rural Baptist church fire, in Lamar County, has been ruled arson but is not believed to be connected to the others. It was discovered on Feb. 11.

Investigators had said earlier that they were looking for two men seen in a dark SUV near a few of the church fires. Agents have said they didn't know a motive, but there is no racial pattern. Five of the churches had white congregations and five black.

The two students arrested Wednesday are white and their college is a Methodist-affiliated liberal arts college.

Five of the churches were destroyed and four were damaged, including one in which congregants, alerted during the night that churches were afire, arrived just as the apparent arsonists were leaving. That fire, quickly put out, had been set in the sanctuary near the altar _ a pattern in the other church arsons in Bibb County and west Alabama.