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The New Year’s Day attack in New Orleans was an “act of terrorism” but not linked to the explosion of a Tesla Cybertruck in Las Vegas just hours later, according to the FBI.
While the investigation into the New Orleans attack was in its early stages, the FBI said it believed the alleged perpetrator, decorated US army veteran Shamsud-Din Jabbar, acted alone.
“It was a premeditated and evil act,” said deputy assistant FBI director Christopher Raia on Thursday. “We’re confident at this point that there is no accomplices [sic].”
There was also “no definitive link between the attack here in New Orleans and the one in Las Vegas” at this stage, Raia said.
Fourteen people were killed and 35 injured when a man drove a pick-up truck into a large crowd and opened fire in the heart of New Orleans in the early hours of New Year’s Day. Jabbar was also killed in a shootout with police.
The atrocity in New Orleans and explosion in Las Vegas rattled Americans just at the end of a busy holiday season, prompting concerns about crime in the US, with Donald Trump trying to blame Joe Biden’s policies for the violence.
Biden was on Thursday briefed on what the White House also called a terrorist attack.
The FBI said it was investigating Jabbar’s potential links to terrorist organisations. On Wednesday, the agency found an Isis flag on his truck, as well as two “functional” improvised explosive devices on the street, which law enforcement disabled, Raia said.
Three phones and two laptops linked to Jabbar have also been recovered from searches, and investigators said they had begun stitching together a timeline of the attack.
Jabbar had picked up the rented Ford F-150 pick-up truck in Houston, Texas, on December 30, and drove east to New Orleans the following day.
In Facebook videos posted along the way Jabbar proclaimed his support for Isis, and said he had originally planned to target family and friends, but “was concerned the news headlines would not focus on the war between the believers and the disbelievers”, Raia said.
The FBI said Jabber claimed to have joined Isis over the summer and had written a will.
Just hours after his devastating attack in New Orleans, a Tesla Cybertruck exploded outside the Trump hotel in Las Vegas.
On Thursday, Las Vegas sheriff Kevin McMahill said that investigators were “not aware” of anyone else involved in the case other than the Cybertruck driver, preliminarily identified as Matthew Livelsberger, 37, also a decorated US soldier.
The driver had sustained a gunshot wound to the head that police believe was self-inflicted before the explosion, McMahill said, standing in front of images of the charred Cybertruck remnants.
Police recovered Livelsberger’s military identification, passport and credit cards, along with a 50-calibre Desert Eagle semi-automatic pistol, a mobile phone and a smartwatch.
The sheriff added that Tesla chief executive Elon Musk had dispatched a team to Las Vegas to gather footage captured from cameras inside the Cybertruck.
No motive has yet been establishes for the Las Vegas “bombing”, an FBI official said.
Kenny Cooper, a US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives special agent in Las Vegas, said “the level of sophistication” of the bomb in the Cybertruck was “not what we would expect from an individual with this type of military experience”.
Jabbar, a 42-year-old US citizen from Texas, was a US Army veteran who worked at consulting firm Deloitte. The firm said on Thursday that Jabbar had had a “staff-level role” since 2021.
“We are outraged by this shameful and senseless act of violence and are doing all we can to assist authorities in their investigation,” Deloitte added.
The US army said Jabbar had served as a human resource and information technology specialist between 2007 and 2020. He was deployed to Afghanistan between February 2009 and January 2010.
The army also confirmed Livelsberger was a serving US soldier. At the time of his death, the master sergeant was assigned to the US Army Special Operations Command and was on approved leave from duty in Germany. McMahill said that Livelsberger was a Green Beret, a member of the elite special forces of the US army.
Both Livelsberger and Jabbar had been stationed at Fort Bragg (now Fort Liberty) in North Carolina, but there was no record that they served there in the same unit or at the same time, said McMahill. There was also no evidence that they had served together in Afghanistan, although investigators continue to search for any possible connection between the men.
Additional reporting by Felicia Schwartz in Washington