An FBI official told reporters Sunday the bureau will investigate New Orleans terrorism suspect Shamsud-Din Jabbar’s past visits to Egypt and Canada in 2023 for clues to his radicalization and possible contacts with the Islamic State.
The attacker drove his truck into a crowd of revelers on New Year’s Day, killing 14 people and injuring dozens more, as Breitbart News reported.
Jabbar, who was killed in a shootout with police after carrying out his attack, was a 42-year-old U.S. Army veteran who pledged allegiance to the Islamic State in videos he posted to Facebook. Police found an ISIS flag in his truck, along with weapons and explosives.
“I wanted to record this message for my family. I wanted you to know that I joined ISIS earlier this year,” Jabbar said at the beginning of one video. He went on to inform his family that his original plan was to murder them all and broadcast their deaths, forcing the world to “witness the killing of the apostates.”
FBI Special Agent in Charge Lyonel Myrthil of the New Orleans field office said Jabbar visited Cairo, Egypt, from June 22-July 3, 2023. Soon after returning from Egypt, he flew to Ontario, Canada, and stayed there from July 10-13, 2023.
“Our agents are getting answers as to where he went, who he met with and how those trips may or may not tie into his actions in our city in New Orleans,” Myrthil said.
Canadian Minister of Public Safety David McGuinty issued a statement on Sunday confirming that Jabbar traveled from Houston to Canada in July 2023.
“Canadian authorities will continue to work with their American counterparts, including the FBI, as they pursue their investigation,” McGuinty said.
The FBI said Jabbar, who lived in a Muslim community north of Houston, Texas, also made trips to New Orleans in October and November 2024. During his October visit, he used a set of “smart glasses” to make recordings of Bourbon Street, which would become the scene of his New Year’s Day attack.
According to Myrthil, Jabbar had the smart glasses in his possession when he launched his terrorist attack.
“We believe he was wearing them throughout the evening. We don’t have any indication that he was actually recording, but he was wearing those glasses,” he said.
Jabbar’s relatives professed surprise at his radicalization. He converted to Islam as an adult, as did his father and some of his brothers, while other members of his extended family were Christians. His family reported few signs of religious extremism, although some of his friends have told the media he became more interested in his religion over the past year, when he moved to the predominantly Muslim neighborhood near Houston and became isolated from many of his previous social contacts.
Jabbar was married and divorced three times, and his third divorce in 2022 seems to have been exceptionally bitter, including a court order for him to stop making threatening phone calls to his ex-wife. Another of his ex-wives “moved to limit his contact with their children as his behavior grew more unpredictable, seemingly influenced by his religious views,” according to a New York Times (NYT) profile published on Saturday.
One of Jabbar’s half-brothers said he became “uneasy” and agitated after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, making comments that the Gaza war was “genocide on both sides” and “inhumane.”
Jabbar apparently became more strict, and more hectoring, about his Muslim conservative views during that period. He uploaded some of his thoughts on Islamic teachings to SoundCloud, including criticism of alcohol, drugs, crime, and rap music as “things that Allah has made forbidden to us.”
Jabbar’s SoundCloud listening history suggests he might have brushed up against some extremist views during the past year, although there was little to suggest an immersion into Islamic State ideology until the final recording where he made his bayat, the ritual declaration of allegiance to ISIS. Terrorism experts have said he followed the correct procedure in his bayat, a potentially significant detail because ISIS is picky about performing such rituals properly.
Members of both of the mosques in Jabbar’s small Houston neighborhood claimed they were unfamiliar with him, and had not seen him at religious services. The Islamic Society of Greater Houston (ISGH) said last week that Jabbar was not a formal member of any of its 21 mosques.
“ISGH has a longstanding absolute zero-tolerance policy against extremism and suspicious activities. The attack on civilians, regardless of their nationality, ethnicity or religion, is an atrocity that no ideology or cause can justify,” the society said.
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