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Before plowing a pickup truck into a crowd of New Year’s revelers in New Orleans and killing 14 people, the man who carried out the Islamic State group-inspired attack had researched how to access a balcony on the city’s famed Bourbon Street and looked up information about a similar attack at a Christmas market in Germany, the FBI said.
Nearly two weeks after Shamsud-Din Jabbar’s rampage, the FBI continues to uncover new information detailing the extensive planning by the 42-year-old US army veteran who scouted out the area multiple times in the months leading up to the attack. Authorities have also been piecing together a timeline of his radicalization.
In the early hours of New Year’s Day, Jabbar could be seen on video surveillance placing two containers with explosive devices, which would remain undetonated, in the French Quarter. Shortly after, at about 3.15am, Jabbar sped a white pickup truck around a police car blockading the entrance of Bourbon Street, where partygoers continued to wander around the street lined with bars. He drove through revelers before crashing and being killed by police in a shootout. Fifty-seven people were injured, authorities said.
Just hours before the deadly onslaught, Jabbar had searched online for information about an attack at a busy outdoor Christmas market in east Germany that had occurred 10 days earlier and in which a car was also used as a mass weapon, the FBI said on Tuesday. The attack in Europe left five people dead and more than 200 were injured after a car slammed into a crowd. Police arrested a 50-year-old doctor from Saudi Arabia who had renounced Islam and supported the far-right AfD party.
In other online searches, Jabbar had looked up how to access a balcony on Bourbon Street, information about Mardi Gras (the culmination of New Orleans’s annual carnival celebrations), and several recent shootings in the city, the FBI said.
But Jabbar’s research ahead of the attack was not limited to online: he also made a one-day visit to New Orleans from Houston on 10 November, during which he looked for an apartment, the FBI said. While Jabbar had applied to rent the apartment, he later told the landlord that he changed his mind.
That was not his only other visit to New Orleans, though. The FBI had previously reported that Jabbar had traveled to the city for a planning trip on 31 October, when he used glasses from Meta, the parent company of Facebook, to record video as he rode through the French Quarter on a bicycle.
In a series of online videos, posted hours before he struck, Jabbar proclaimed support for the IS militant group. The Bourbon Street attack was the deadliest IS-inspired assault on US soil in years.
On Tuesday, the FBI continued to draft out a timeline of Jabbar’s radicalization, saying that he began isolating himself from society and became a more devout Muslim in 2022. By 2024 spring, he began following extremist views.
While investigations into the attack are ongoing and additional information continues to trickle about Jabbar’s planning of the deadly rampage, city officials face questions about safety concerns.
State and local authorities have launched inquiries into possible security deficiencies that left New Orleans vulnerable. The work is especially urgent since carnival season, a months long celebration that attracts tens of thousands of visitors to the French Quarter, began last week. The city is also set to host the Super Bowl on 9 February.
