A 42-year-old man drove his vehicle into a crowd this Wednesday, January 1st, in the French Quarter of New Orleans, located in the southern United States. The toll is at least fifteen dead (including the suspect) and 35 injured.
The former U.S. military man accused of killing 14 people and wounding about 30 others when he drove his pickup truck into a New Year's Eve crowd in the heart of New Orleans claimed to have joined the Islamic State group and appears to have acted alone, the FBI announced Thursday.
The suspect in the attack, which police are treating as a “terrorist act,” was Shamsud-Din Jabbar, a 42-year-old U.S. citizen from Texas who had previously worked in technology and human resources for the Army. He had been deployed to Afghanistan.
After causing “carnage” with his vehicle, he was killed in an exchange of fire with police on the night of December 31 to January 1 in the ultra-touristy French Quarter of this large Louisiana city.
After estimating Wednesday that Jabbar had not acted alone, the FBI reversed this judgment Thursday. “We do not believe at this point that anyone else was involved in this attack, other than Shamsud-Din Jabbar,”, Christopher Raia, a senior FBI official, said at a press conference.
The suspect proclaimed in several videos his support for the Islamic State group (IS) and also claimed to have joined the jihadist organization, the police officer added.
Five videos were published Tuesday on Jabbar's Facebook account in which “he explained that he had initially planned to attack his family and friends, but that he was worried that the headlines would not focus on, and I quote: 'The war between the faithful and the infidels'”, said the FBI official, the American federal police.
Jabbar had also planted two homemade bombs in the neighborhood. “We obtained CCTV videos that show (the suspect) placing the devices where they were found” and defusing them, Mr. Raia further stressed.
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On Thursday, the “Vieux Carré”, New Orleans' famous “French Quarter” with its small French colonial town feel, is flooded with sunshine and the light typical of the tropical south of the United States.
But the neighborhood is cordoned off by police officers on edge. At the scene of the attack, between Canal Street and Bourbon Street, most of the restaurants, bars, jazz clubs, cabarets and places frequented by the LGBTQ+ community are closed.
Nearby, Andy Briggs buys himself some doughnuts before a big college football game that has been postponed 24 hours to Thursday.
“I'm not particularly worried about security. Given what the FBI and local police have told the press, I'm calm: all the necessary precautions have been taken,” the 39-year-old told AFP.
At around 3:15 a.m. (09:15 GMT) on Wednesday, driving a large, rented electric Ford pickup truck, Jabbar drove into the crowds of people walking around on New Year's Eve. He was “fiercely determined to cause carnage” and “to run over as many people” as possible, local police chief Anne Kirkpatrick had stressed early in the morning.
“Scary” and “vile”
“It was scary, I cried hot tears”, Ethan Ayersman, a 20-year-old tourist who, from the window of his rented accommodation, saw “some of the bodies lined up” at sol.
President Joe Biden, who will hand over the keys to the White House to Donald Trump on January 20 in an ultra-tense political climate, denounced Wednesday evening a “despicable attack”.
Shamsud-Din Jabbar served in the Army from 2007 to 2015, including a year in Afghanistan in 2009, and was discharged with the rank of master sergeant, according to the Pentagon.
His brother Abdur Jabbar said of him in the New York Times that he had converted to Islam at a young age, and had certainly then experienced “a form of radicalization”.
The FBI had stated on Wednesday that “an ISIS flag was in his vehicle”. The FBI also explained on Thursday that it had not established an “irrefutable link” between the attack in New Orleans and the explosion on Wednesday of a Tesla Cybertruck in front of a Trump hotel in Las Vegas, which left one person dead. The Ford and Tesla vehicles in both events had been rented on the peer-to-peer sharing app Turo, which cooperates with the police. President-elect Donald Trump, who campaigned on denouncing illegal immigration, had immediately made the connection with the millions of illegal immigrants in the United States. He repeated the same refrain on Thursday by denouncing the “vermin” violent” which has “infiltrated” throughout the United States thanks, according to him, to Joe Biden's policy of “open borders“.