MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Suspicious connection detected in recent US criminal events

The perpetrators of the two New Year's attacks plus the man who allegedly tried to kill Trump last year had been tracked down to his military compound

Theories that both the Tesla Cybertruck explosion in front of the Trump Tower in Las Vegas, Nevada, and the ramming of New Year celebrating pedestrians on New Orleans' Bourbon Street were connected terrorist attacks gained strength as it was determined that the two perpetrators had a military background, including a past at the Fort Liberty base in North Carolina, formerly known as Fort Bragg.

Matthew Livelsberger, 37, who was last stationed at Camp Panzer Kaserne near Stuttgart, Germany, was driving the Tesla vehicle as it went off on Jan. 1. He joined the Green Berets in 2006 and, after around 19 years in the Army, he was about to reach the time when he could have retired with full military benefits.

Shamsud-Din Jabbar, who served in Afghanistan from 2009 to 2010, was gunned down by law enforcement officers after running over a crowd and getting off the Ford F-150 pickup truck to shoot survivors.

Both individuals had served at Fort Liberty -formerly Fort Bragg- where the US Army's elite Psychological Operations Unit as well as other special operations are headquartered. Fort Bragg's collaboration with the CIA and its involvement in high-level psychological training programs was also mentioned by various media reports.

Both veterans were also said to be staunch supporters of Donald Trump. Ryan Routh, the man who allegedly tried to kill the Republican leader during the 2024 campaign, was known to have visited Fort Bragg over 100 times before being arrested.

Although uncorroborated, it is feared that something happens at Fort Liberty, possibly a selection process criteria targetting candidates more susceptible to radicalization. According to the FBI, Jabbar had recently pledged allegiance to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), an organization that has carried out other attacks in the United States, such as the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida, where 49 people were killed and another 53 were injured.

Another shooting linked to ISIS occurred in December 2015, when 14 people were killed and 22 others were injured in a shooting spree at a Department of Public Health Christmas party by the married couple of Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, who had made their allegiance to ISIS known through a Facebook account.

Sayfullo Habibullaevic Sipov drove a pickup truck into people on a bicycle lane along the Hudson River in New York City on Halloween in 2017, killing 8 and injuring 13. Five Argentine tourists were among the dead. Investigators found documents suggesting Saipov had an allegiance to ISIS inside the truck.

It is yet to be determined whether the incident in which at least 11 people were injured overnight in a mass shooting outside the Amazura Concert Hall in New York's Queens borough minutes before midnight on Wednesday (local time) was also connected to terrorism on US soil. None of the victims - six females and four males aged from 16 to 19 - was critically injured. NYPD's Philip Rivera said they were investigating if the shooting was gang-related but did not believe it was part of terrorism.