US law enforcement and intelligence agencies are reportedly concerned about copycat vehicle-ramming attacks following the attack in New Orleans by a US military veteran, Shamsud-Din Jabbar.
According to a bulletin seen by Reuters, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the US National Counterterrorism Center “are concerned about possible copycat or retaliatory attacks”.
Such attacks “are likely to remain attractive for aspiring assailants given vehicles’ ease of acquisition and the low skill threshold necessary to conduct an attack”, the bulletin issued to US law-enforcement agencies said.
The bulletin was issued a day after the FBI said Jabbar, a 42-year-old Texas native, was “100% inspired” by the Islamic State militant group to drive a truck into New Year’s Day revelers in New Orleans, killing at least 14 people and injuring dozens of others.
The warning advised law-enforcement personnel and private security firms to be aware that in many previous cases attackers who rammed vehicles into crowds were armed and continued their attacks with guns or “edged weapons”.
The New York Times reported that a confidential security report had warned in 2019 that Bourbon Street, where the New Year’s Day attack occurred, was vulnerable to a “vehicular ramming”.
The assessment warned that bollards designed to block vehicles from entering the narrow street did “not appear to work” and said “the two modes of terror attack likely to be used are vehicular ramming and active shooting”.
Police officials said the city had started work to replace the old barriers in November and said they did not anticipate an attacker would use the sidewalk to evade a police car blocking the street.
“This should be no surprise to anyone who’s ever been tasked with protecting an area dense with pedestrian traffic,” said Don Aviv, chief executive of the security firm Interfor International, which performed the 2019 security assessment.
“The French Quarter is the perfect target,” Aviv added.
The intelligence assessment noted that the vehicle-ramming incident was the seventh such attack in the US since 2001 that was inspired by a foreign extremist organization.
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The warnings of vehicular attacks, however, are not new. In 2010, the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI wrote in a memo that car attacks offer “terrorists with limited access to explosives or weapons an opportunity to conduct a homeland attack with minimal prior training or experience”.
That memo also warned that attacks could occur in areas where people congregate, and that the method “offers terrorists with limited access to explosives or weapons an opportunity to conduct a homeland attack with minimal prior training or experience”.
Prior to the attack in New Orleans this week, the deadliest US vehicle attack came in 2017, when Sayfullo Saipov, 29, drove a pickup truck down a crowded bike path along the Hudson River in Manhattan, killing eight people and injuring 11. Investigators described the attack as “inspired” by IS.
In 2103, al-Qaida wrote about such attacks in its English-language magazine. It warned: “The idea is to use a pickup truck as a mowing machine, not to mow grass but mow down the enemies of Allah.”
