Associated Press|
Neubauer Coporation Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... |
The FBI’s assistant director of counterterrorism unit said he acted alone but never revealed he was an informant of the agency. He was highly in debt, was in the middle of divorce, and contacted his attorneys he couldn’t pay his mortgage said SCMP. They first misidentified the suspect and identified as another person. According to the spokesperson of the HSI the attacker informed for the FBI since he was a soldier with his Green Beret unit in Afghanistan.
The man who drove a pickup truck into a crowd in New Orleans on New Year’s Eve acted alone, says Christopher Raia.
US authorities previously said the attacker was 42-year-old Afghan war veteran Shamsud-Din Jabbar.
The attack killed 15 people and injured at least 35. One of the dead was Jabbar himself. Police are investigating the incident as a terrorist attack.
According to Raia, Jabbar had also planted two homemade bombs in the same area before his car attack. The bombs did not have time to explode.
Authorities had previously reported that Jabbar had posted videos on social media, one of which showed him saying he had joined the Islamist terrorist organization ISIS.
Raia says in a press conference that in one video, Jabbar says he changed his plans. According to Raia, Jabbar “originally planned to hurt his family and friends, but was worried that the headlines would then focus on a war between believers and unbelievers.”
The popular Bourbon Street, where the attack took place, was reopened ahead of the Sugar Bowl football game. The Sugar Bowl was scheduled to be played on New Year’s Day, but was postponed by a day because of the attack.
US authorities said earlier on Thursday that the New Orleans attack was unlikely to be connected to the explosion in Las Vegas on Wednesday .
Trump blamed immigrants
President-elect Donald Trump blamed the attack on President Joe Biden and the Democratic Party’s border policies, despite the fact that the attacker was a US citizen.
Just hours after the attack early Wednesday, Trump wrote on his Truth Social media platform that he was right when he said that “the criminals who are coming here are much worse than the criminals who are already here.”
On Thursday, Trump continued, among other things, by blaming authorities and Democratic prosecutors and saying that border policy has made the United States a “laughable place.”
“They are incompetent and corrupt because they have spent all their time illegally attacking their political opponent, ME, instead of focusing on protecting the American people from the external and internal TRASH that has infiltrated our entire government and nation,” Trump wrote.
Source: AFP
Amandine Lhoste
Eva Thomas
Alessandra Signorelli
Alexis Parker