the suspect is a soldier with “unknown” motivations

The suspect in the explosion of a Tesla Cybertruck outside the Trump Hotel in Las Vegas had a gunshot wound to the head and his motives are “unknown”announced this Thursday, January 2, the local police and the FBI.

The body found Wednesday inside the vehicle has not yet been formally identified pending DNA analyses, Las Vegas Sheriff Kevin McMahill said at a press conference. But authorities believe it is Matthew Alan Livelsberger, a 37-year-old soldier.

“We discovered, thanks to the medical examiner's office, that the individual had been shot in the head before the vehicle exploded”explained the sheriff, suggesting suicide.

“The suspect’s motives remain unknown at this stage. (…) We do not have information that allows us to say with certainty or suggest that this was motivated by a particular ideology”declared at the same press conference Spencer Evans, special agent of the FBI, the federal police.

Enlisted in the US Army between 2006 and 2011

Matthew Alan Livelsberger is a member of the United States Army Special Forces, who was in “permission approved at the time of his death”a Pentagon spokesperson said in a statement.

According to this spokesperson, Livelsberger joined in 2006 and served in the army until 2011, before joining the National Guard then the reserve army, and finally joining the special forces in 2012.

Images posted on social networks showed a gray Cybertruck electric vehicle on Wednesday parked in front of the entrance to the hotel where the name « Trump » appears large, exploding in a huge cloud of smoke. The explosion also injured seven people.

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No “irrefutable link” with New Orleans attack

The explosion came hours after a car-ramming attack in New Orleans, in which 14 people were killed and around 30 injured.

The suspect in this attack is a former American soldier named Shamsud-Din Jabbar. He had proclaimed in several videos his support for the Islamic State (IS) group and had also claimed to have joined the jihadist organization, according to the FBI. The FBI said this Thursday that there was no “irrefutable link” between the two events.

Sheriff McMahill said Wednesday that the back of the Tesla vehicle contained cans of gasoline and “large fireworks mortars”. He estimated that the structure of the Cybertruck had “permit to limit the damage”.