A white pickup, rented via a car rental company, drove around police barricades and into a crowd of New Year's revelers in New Orleans. At least 14 people were killed and at least 35 injured.
The driver of the car has been identified by the FBI as Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar, a 42-year-old American citizen from Texas. He died on the spot after a shootout with the police.
Jabbar enlisted in the US Army in 2007 and worked partly with HR and partly as an IT specialist. He was sent to Afghanistan for almost a year, 2009-2010, and was then transferred to the US Army Reserve in 2015. Five years later, in 2020, he left the military altogether.
Had large debts
Jabbar struggled to adjust to life outside the military, reports The New York Times. In an interview with the university newspaper at Georgia State University, where he studied between 2015 and 2017, Jabbar said that he found it challenging to communicate without falling back into the military jargon he had adopted during his years in the army, which he believed could make it difficult for veterans to find civilian jobs.
Court documents obtained by the AP news agency show that Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar's economy deteriorated in 2022, when he separated from his then-wife.
In an email to his ex-wife's lawyer, Jabbar wrote that he was behind on payments of $27,000 for his mortgage and had accumulated $16,000 in credit card debt.
IS flag found
At the same time, in January 2022, he worked with business development and other tasks for the consulting firm Deloitte. In a comment, Deloitte states that Jabbar was employed in 2021 in a role "at staff level".
A flag representing the terrorist organization IS was found in the pickup that Jabbar drove. Just hours before the attack, he uploaded five videos to social media that indicate he was inspired by IS. In a speech, US President Joe Biden said that Jabbar seemed to express "a desire to kill".
In one of the videos, Jabbar says that he initially thought of harming his family and friends, but then changed his mind because it would not have illustrated "the war between believers and non-believers", according to the FBI.
The FBI initially believed that Jabbar did not act alone in the attack, but has now changed its opinion and believes that he carried out the attack on his own.
