Suicide Plane Crashes Into IRS Building

AUSTIN (CN) - The Austin sky filled with smoke and the smell of burning metal Thursday morning when a software engineer, infuriated with the Internal Revenue Service, flew his small plane into an office building containing nearly 200 IRS employees, killing himself and at least one other person and injuring at least 13.

Andrew Joseph Stack III left a suicide note and set fire to his north Austin home before killing himself.

An IRS employee who works in the building said in a telephone interview that he thought a lot of case information may have been destroyed in the fire, as it is stored on paper and not in electronic format. The name of the second dead person had not been released by early today (Friday).

The blast, which terrified far more people than the 13 it injured, caused flames to shoot from the building, windows to shatter and onlookers to fear for their safety.

Stack had posted a long suicide note on his software company's Web site 8 hours before he killed himself.

In the 6-page anti-government rant he blames the national government, specifically the IRS, for his financial troubles and for leaving him "to rot and die while they bailed out their rich, incompetent cronies".

The IRS offices destroyed by the plane are discreetly located in a 7-story black, glass building. In recent weeks the IRS discovered bullet holes in the windows of the same offices, thought to have been fired overnight.

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