The FBI contradicted the Louisiana State Police (LSP) Thursday afternoon, saying that Shamsud-Din Jabbar, who plowed through a crowd on Bourbon Street in New Orleans on New Years Eve killing 15, acted alone.
Previously, an LSP intelligence report said that surveillance cameras in the city caught three men and a woman planting one of several improvised explosive devices near Bourbon Street, as reported by Fox News on Wednesday.
But during a Thursday press conference, an FBI spokesman said the federal law enforcement group now believes Jabbar acted alone. There was no explanation given for the apparent contradiction.
Thursday’s developments were announced after the FBI originally stated that the mass casualty event was not a terror attack on Wednesday morning.
The FBI also said Thursday that Jabbar posted several videos of himself pledging his allegiance to ISIS on his personal Facebook page in the hours leading up to the attack, and that he joined ISIS before last summer. Since Jabbar’s Facebook page has been taken down, those videos are not available for the public to view.
They also noted that Jabbar intended to kill his family but was concerned that if he did so, media attention would not be focused on the “war between believers & disbelievers.”
The FBI noted that it had no intelligence on Jabbar before the attack, meaning that we not on the FBI’s radar at all.
It has also been reported that Jabbar lived just blocks from Houston’s Masjid Bilal mosque where goats and sheep roamed his yard, and that most of his neighbors were Muslim immigrants.
That mosque put out a statement telling its members not to speak with law enforcement about the terror attack, and if pressed, to call the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), well-known for its close ties to Hamas.
According to authorities, the case is not linked to Wednesday’s attack at the Trump Tower in Las Vegas.
Wednesday, U.S. Army Green Beret Matthew Livelsberger shot himself in the head just before detonating a hand-crafted bomb inside of a Tesla Cybertruck, according to the FBI in Las Vegas.
Despite a massive fire that destroyed the vehicle, authorities found Livelsberger’s barely-damaged military identification and passport inside.
His family spoke out Thursday in disbelief, saying that Livelsberger was a huge supporter of President-Elect Donald Trump, and that given his military experience, he could have fashioned a bomb that would have destroyed the entire building.
Authorities have not released a motive for that attack.
