The former American soldier accused of killing 14 people and injuring around thirty others by driving his pickup into a New Year’s Eve crowd in the heart of New Orleans had 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 and former technology and human resources employee in the military. of earth. He was notably deployed in Afghanistan.
After causing “carnage” with his vehicle, he was killed in exchanges of fire with the police on the night of December 31 to January 1 in the ultra-touristy French quarter of this large Louisiana city.
After estimating on Wednesday that Jabbar had not acted alone, the FBI reversed this judgment on Thursday. “We do not believe at this point that anyone else was involved in this attack, with the exception of 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 (IS) group and also claimed to have joined the jihadist organization, the police officer added.
Five videos were posted Tuesday on Jabbar’s Facebook account in which “he explains that he initially planned to attack his family and friends, but was worried that newspaper headlines would not focus on I quote: +The war between the faithful and the infidels+,” said the head of the FBI, the American federal police.
Jabbar had also planted two homemade bombs in the neighborhood. “We obtained remote surveillance videos which show (the suspect) placing the devices where they were found” and defused, Mr. Raia further underlined.
– “French Quarter cordoned off –
On Thursday, the “Vieux Carré”, the famous “French Quarter” of New Orleans, which looks like a small French colonial town, is flooded with sunshine and the typical light of the tropical south of the United States.
But the neighborhood is cordoned off by police officers on edge.
At the site of the attack, between Canal Street and Bourbon Street, most restaurants, bars, jazz clubs, cabarets and places frequented by the LGBTQ+ community are closed.
Nearby, Andy Briggs buys donuts before a big college football game that has been moved 24 hours to Thursday.
“I am not particularly worried about security. Given what the FBI and the local police have said to the press, I am calm: all the necessary precautionary measures have been taken,” the man told AFP. 39 years old.
Around 3:15 a.m. (09:15 GMT) on Wednesday, at the wheel of a large rental electric Ford pick-up, Jabbar drove into the crowd wandering around on New Year’s Eve. He was “fiercely determined to cause carnage” and “crush as many people” as possible, Anne Kirkpatrick, the local police chief, had stressed in the morning.
– “Scary” and “vile” –
“It was scary, I cried my eyes out,” Ethan Ayersman, a 20-year-old tourist, told AFP on Wednesday evening who, from the window of his rented accommodation, saw “some of the bodies lined up” at the ground.
President Joe Biden, who will return the keys to the White House to Donald Trump on January 20 in an ultra-tense political climate, denounced a “despicable attack” on Wednesday evening.
Shamsud-Din Jabbar served in the Army from 2007 to 2015, including a year in Afghanistan in 2009, and was discharged at 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 subsequently experienced “a form of radicalization”.
The FBI said on Wednesday that “an ISIS flag was in his vehicle.”
The FBI also explained 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 dead.
The Ford and Tesla vehicles in both incidents 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, made the connection, without delay, with the millions of illegal immigrants in the United States.
He took up the same antiphon Thursday, denouncing the “violent vermin” who have “infiltrated” everywhere in the United States thanks, according to him, to Joe Biden’s “open borders” policy.
