[1][4][8] At his trial in the Los Angeles County Superior Court, Kurbegovic successfully defended himself by "point[ing] out the physical impossibility of masturbating on the toilet seat where he was arrested", and he was found not guilty.
[4] Despite his acquittal, Kurbegovic's arrest severely impacted his life: he was fired from his aerospace job, leaving him unemployed for a year before finding work in manufacturing; his chances of gaining American citizenship were jeopardized and he was at risk of deportation; and when he applied to open his own dance hall, the LAPD denied his required police permit citing his criminal record, a ruling that the Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioners, the LAPD's civilian oversight board, upheld.
[4][5][9] The lasting consequences of his arrest led to Kurbegovic developing a personal vendetta against judicial officials, namely the municipal court judge who oversaw his trial and the police commissioners who denied his permit appeal.
[8] In June 1974, McGaughey, the president of the Board of Police Commissioners, received two suspicious phone calls, the first being nothing but breathing, and the second being a death threat allegedly from the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) that claimed he would be killed within 30 days.
[7][8] On July 4, 1974, arson fires burned three apartment buildings in the Greater Los Angeles area, one in Santa Monica and two in Marina del Rey.
[6][7] On August 6, at around 8:10 am, a bomb placed by Kurbegovic inside a coin-operated public locker in the Pan Am lobby of the Los Angeles International Airport exploded, killing 3 people and injuring 36 others.
[3][10] That night, Conrad Casler, city editor for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, received a phone call from Kurbegovic in which he claimed responsibility in the name of Aliens of America, and confirmed his identity by correctly identifying the bomb's locker number as "T 225"—information that had not yet been made public.
[7] On August 16, at around 9:00 pm, Kurbegovic sent a newspaper a cassette tape warning officials he had placed an explosive in a locker ("L") at a Greyhound Lines station in Downtown Los Angeles.
[7][12]: 379 In custody, Kurbegovic alternated between acting deaf-mute and speaking, and continued to make several unfounded threats, such as a bomb allegedly planted among the thermonuclear weapons at a United States Air Force installation.
[4] Investigators searching Kurbegovic's apartment discovered assembled pipe bombs, assorted bomb-making paraphernalia, and receipts for chemicals addressed to Hughes Aircraft.
[6] Reportedly, Kurbegovic possessed every ingredient necessary to create an actual lethal nerve agent except a certain organic phosphate that he had already ordered which, at the time of his arrest, had arrived in Los Angeles and was waiting for pickup.
[13] According to chemical weapons experts Neil C. Livingstone and Joseph D. Douglass in their 1984 paper CBW: The Poor Man's Atomic Bomb, as well as LAPD Detective Arleigh McCree, in mid-August 1974 Kurbegovic stated he would travel to Washington, D.C. to assassinate newly-elected President Gerald Ford and outgoing President Richard Nixon with a nerve agent that he proceeded to describe in detail, leading to the United States Secret Service and the Central Intelligence Agency joining the investigation.