The Capitol building in Washington on Aug. 7, 2026. A man who parked a truck carrying a guillotine in the heart of Washington was arrested by the United States Capitol Police on Tuesday, Aug. 26, 2026, officials said. (Alex Kent/The New York Times)
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A man who parked a truck carrying a guillotine in the heart of Washington was arrested by the United States Capitol Police on Tuesday, officials said.
Just after 3 p.m., officers noticed a pickup truck parked illegally, police said in a news release. The truck was found on the 100 block of East Capitol Street NE, which runs alongside the Supreme Court building and leads to the grassy grounds surrounding the Capitol Building, the police said.
Then, in the bed of the truck, they spotted the unmistakable apparatus best known for executions during the French Revolution.
“This afternoon our officers seized a guillotine,” police said in a Facebook post.
Police arrested Philan-Tam-Duy Le, 35, of Julian, California, for “being in possession of the guillotine,” the department said in the statement. He was charged with carrying a dangerous weapon.
“It did have a real blade,” the police’s public information office said of the guillotine in reply to questions on Wednesday.
The man had driven to the nation’s capital from California, police said. The truck was parked not far from the Library of Congress and other prominent Washington buildings.
Capitol Police investigators were combing Le’s background in hopes of learning more about why he came to Washington, police said.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia said in an email that the situation “remained an active investigation.”
A lawyer for Le, Anthony Smith, could not be reached Wednesday, when he was scheduled to appear in arraignment court, according to court records.
It was unclear whether Le had driven the truck across the country with the guillotine on it, a journey that could have been more than 2,500 miles.
During the French Revolution in the late 1700s, executions by guillotine were a public spectacle. An estimated 17,000 people were beheaded with the device during the revolution’s Reign of Terror phase.
The latest use of the guillotine for a judicial execution was in 1977, in Marseille, France, to kill a 28-year-old Tunisian man convicted of murder.
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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
By Christine Hauser/Alex Kent
c. 2026 The New York Times Company
