(Las Vegas) The suspect in the explosion of a Tesla Cybertruck vehicle in front of the Trump Hotel in Las Vegas had a gunshot wound to the head and his motives are “unknown,” local police announced Thursday and the FBI.
Posted at 12:35 p.m.
Updated at 3:22 p.m.
Wade Vandervort
Agence France-Presse
What you need to know
- Seven people nearby were slightly injured when the Tesla van exploded;
- The explosion came hours after a car-ramming attack in New Orleans, in which 14 people were killed and around 30 injured;
- The FBI said Thursday that there was no “irrefutable link” between the two events.
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 suffered a gunshot wound to 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 it was motivated by a particular ideology,” Spencer Evans, special agent of the FBI, the federal police, said at the same press conference.
Matthew Alan Livelsberger is a member of the US Army Special Forces, who was on “approved leave 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 on Wednesday a gray Cybertruck electric vehicle, parked in front of the entrance to the hotel where the name “Trump” is displayed in large format, exploding in a huge cloud of smoke.
The explosion also injured seven people.
The FBI said in a post on X on Thursday that it was conducting “operations” at a Colorado Springs home linked to Wednesday’s explosion, but provided no further details.
PHOTO CHRISTIAN MURDOCK, ASSOCIATED PRESS
The FBI said Thursday that she was conducting “operations” at a home in Colorado Springs.
Elon Musk, the boss of Tesla, is an ally of President-elect Donald Trump, who has charged him with an extragovernmental mission of deregulation and reduction of public spending in his future government.
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 Thursday that there was no “irrefutable link” between the two events.
Sheriff McMahill said Wednesday that the rear of the Tesla vehicle contained cans of gasoline and “large fireworks mortars.” He estimated that the structure of the Cybertruck had “helped limit the damage”.
Who was Matthew Livelsberger?
Matthew Livelsberger was a member of the U.S. Army’s “Green Berets,” a unit of special forces and guerrilla experts, according to an Army statement. Joining the Army in 2006, he rose through the ranks and was on approved leave when he died, according to the release. The Green Berets work to counter terrorists overseas using “unconventional” techniques. Livelsberger spent time at the base formerly known as “Fort Bragg,” a major base in North Carolina that houses the Army’s Special Forces Command.
