- US authorities are concerned that the Jan 1 New Year’s Day attack in New Orleans could lead to similar incidents.
- Shamsud-Din Jabbar killed 14 people when he drove a truck into a crowd displaying an Islamic State flag.
- Feds know that big, heavy vehicles like trucks are easy to acquire and have the potential to cause lots of damage.
The New Year’s Day terror attack in New Orleans which left more than a dozen people dead has US authorities worried that a spate of copycat incidents could follow.
Late last week the FBI issued a bulletin asserting that US Army veteran Shamsud-Din Jabbar’s decision to drive into revelers was 100 percent inspired by Islamic State. The 42-year-old from Texas plowed into a crowd with a truck displaying the Islamic State flag, killing 14 people and injuring many more.
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The FBI, as well as other federal agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security and the US National Counterterrorism Center, are “concerned about possible copycat or retaliatory attacks,” according to the text of the bulletin, Reuters reports.
What concerns authorities in particular is terrorists’ easy access to big, heavy vehicles like trucks that can cause huge amounts of damage. Trucks are everywhere in the US, and can easily be bought or rented. Jabbar is reported to have hired his Ford F-150 Lightning from Turo, the same rental website Matthew Livelsberger used to get his hands on the Tesla Cybertrack that exploded outside the Trump Hotel in Las Vegas a week ago.
New Orleans Police Department Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick said Jabbar swerved around barricades in New Orleans’ French Quarter at 03.15 during NYE celebrations. He was driving at “very high speed” with the clear intention of striking as many people as possible, she told CBS News.
When the truck eventually stopped Jabbar jumped out armed with a gun and carried on his attack. He fired at police officers who shot back and killed him at the scene. Jabbar had also placed two coolers filled with makeshift explosives in the city’s streets, but they failed to detonate.
The FBI warns in its bulletin that terrorist assaults like this “are likely to remain attractive for aspiring attackers given vehicles’ ease of acquisition and the low skill threshold necessary to conduct an attack.”
