GUWAHATI, Jan 3: Shamsud-Din Jabbar, the 42-year-old US Army veteran who drove a pickup truck into a crowd of New Year revelers in New Orleans killing 14 people before he was shot dead by police, was an ISIS-inspired “terrorist” who “joined the Islamic State” and had previously “planned to harm his family and friends”, reports said.
The ISIS-inspired terrorist left behind a chilling scene in his North Houston trailer home wherein he had a workbench for assembling explosives, a Quran open to a passage glorifying violence and a number of compounds used in bomb-making, video accessed by the New York Post showed.
Jabbar had posted 5 videos on Facebook hours before the attack.
“He planned to harm his family and friends”, but was concerned that the media coverage would not focus on the “war between the believers and the disbelievers”, news agency Reuters quoted FBI deputy assistant director Christopher Raia as saying, while briefing media about the investigations.
The FBI also recovered a black Islamic State flag from his rented pick-up trailer.
The Texas-born US citizen and an Army veteran served in the US Army from March 2007 to January 2015, and then in the Army Reserve from January 2015 to July 2020. He was deployed in Afghanistan from February 2009 to January 2010 and ended his service as a staff sergeant.
