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,” local police and the FBI announced Thursday.
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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 it was motivated by a particular ideology,” declared at the same press conference Spencer Evans, special agent of the FBI , the federal police.
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.
Seven injured
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 on Wednesday showed a gray Cybertruck electric vehicle, parked in front of the entrance to the hotel where the name “Trump” is displayed in large format, explode in a huge cloud of smoke.
The explosion also injured seven people.
Elon Musk, the boss of Tesla, is an ally of President-elect Donald Trump, who has charged him with an extra-governmental 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”.
