“We’re confident, at this point, that there are no accomplices,” said FBI Deputy Assistant Director Christopher Raia on Thursday during a news briefing regarding Shamsud-Din Jabbar, who drove a vehicle into a crowd on Bourbon Street in New Orleans early Wednesday, killing 14 and wounding dozens more. Jabbar hailed from Texas and spent nearly eight years in the Army, including a trip to Afghanistan. He made a social media post prior to the attack, claiming to have joined the Islamic State terrorist group.
Raia said detectives had not found a link between Jabbar and the Cybertruck that detonated outside the Trump International Hotel Las Vegas on the same day, but they did not rule out the potential that the two acts were coordinated. Both attacks share superficial parallels, including the timing, the usage of vehicles rented from the same business, Turo, and the fact that Matthew Livelsberger, the guy accused of driving in Las Vegas, served on the same military base as Jabbar. Raia told football fans that the Sugar Bowl, which had been postponed for 24 hours due to the attack, had taken all required safety procedures to resume on Thursday. However, New Orleans remains on edge as it prepares to welcome tens of thousands of people to the to welcome tens of thousands of people for the Super Bowl next month. And it isn’t the only city concerned about large gatherings in the wake of the attack: In Washington, DC, fears have ticked up about potential violence during Jimmy Carter’s upcoming funeral or Donald Trump’s victory rally and inauguration
Despite these warnings, the president-elect responded by linking the New Orleans incident to poor border control and the perils of illegal immigration, despite the fact that Jabbar was an American citizen. Ian Bremmer, the founder of GZERO Media, claims that “far from rallying around the flag,” Trump’s “response to a devastating terrorist attack was disinformation and greater political division.”




0 Comments