The U.S. Army veteran who drove a pickup truck into a crowd of New Year’s revelers in New Orleans posted a series of videos to social media in the hours before the attack, the FBI said Thursday.
The FBI revealed that driver Shamsud-Din Jabbar, a U.S. citizen from Texas, posted five videos on his Facebook account proclaiming his support for the Islamic State group and previewing the violence that he would soon unleash in the city's famed French Quarter district.
They also now believe he acted alone, reversing their position from a day earlier that he likely worked with others in the deadliest IS-inspired assault on U.S. soil in years.
“This was an act of terrorism. It was premeditated and an evil act,” said Christopher Raia, the deputy assistant director of the FBI's counterterrorism division, calling Jabbar “100% inspired” by the Islamic State.
The attack killed 14 revelers, along with Jabbar, who was fatally shot in a firefight with police after steering his speeding truck around a barricade and plowing into the crowd, laying bare what federal officials have warned is a resurgent international terrorism threat. That threat is emerging as the FBI and other agencies brace for dramatic leadership upheaval after President-elect Donald Trump's administration takes office.
Seeking to assuage concerns about any broader plots, Raia stressed that there was no indication of a connection between the New Orleans attack and a Tesla Cybertruck explosion Wednesday outside Trump’s Las Vegas hotel.
The FBI continued to hunt for clues, but said that 24 hours into its investigation, it was now confident that the 42-year-old Jabbar was not aided by anyone else in the attack, which killed an 18-year-old aspiring nurse, a father of two and a former Princeton University football star, among others.
Officials have reviewed surveillance video showing people standing near an improvised explosive device that Jabbar placed in a cooler along the city's Bourbon Street, where the attack occurred, but authorities “do not believe at this point these people are involved ... in any way,” Raia said.
Investigators were also trying to understand more about Jabbar's path to radicalization, which they say culminated with him picking up a rented truck in Houston on Dec. 30 and driving it to New Orleans the following night.
Feeling out of the loop? We'll catch you up on the Chicago news you need to know. Sign up for the weekly> Chicago Catch-Up newsletter.
The FBI recovered a black Islamic State flag from his rented pickup and reviewed five videos posted to Facebook, including one in which he said he originally planned to harm his family and friends, but was concerned that news headlines would not focus on the “war between the believers and the disbelievers,” Raia said. He also left a last will and testament, the FBI said.
Jabbar joined the Army in 2007, serving on active duty in human resources and information technology and deploying to Afghanistan from 2009 to 2010, the service said. He transferred to the Army Reserve in 2015 and left in 2020 with the rank of staff sergeant.
Abdur-Rahim Jabbar, Jabbar's younger brother, told The Associated Press on Thursday that it “doesn’t feel real” that his brother could have done this.
“I never would have thought it’d be him,” he said. “It’s completely unlike him.”
He said that his brother had been isolated in the last few years, but that he had also been in touch with him and he didn’t see any signs of radicalization.
“It’s completely contradictory to who he was and how his family and his friends know him,” he said.
FBI officials have repeatedly warned about an elevated international terrorism threat due to the Israel-Hamas war. In the last year, the agency has disrupted other potential attacks, including in October when it arrested an Afghan man in Oklahoma for an alleged Election Day plot targeting large crowds.
