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Suspect reportedly recorded videos in which he spoke about his membership in the Islamic State. He had plans to kill his family.
Shamsud-Din Jabbar42, is a former military officer and the main suspect of driving a van into a crowd on Bourbon Street in the early hours of January 1, killing 14 people and injuring dozens of others.
Jabbar rented the truck which he used in the New Year’s attack, a Ford F-150 Lightning electric truck, on the car rental website Turo, which allows owners to rent their vehicles to others.
In the hours and minutes leading up to the attack, published five videos on Facebook, guaranteed Christopher Raia, deputy assistant director of the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division, in a press conference last Thursday, writes .
In the videos, he talked about his divorce (he was divorced twice) and about a plan he had: initially, he had planned gather his family for a “celebration” with the intention of killing them, said two employees briefed on the recordings.
But Jabbar said, however, that he changed plans because he wanted newspaper headlines to focus on “war between believers and unbelievers“. He was also talking in the videos about the Islamic State, which he had joined in the summer of 2024.
Jabbar was born and raised in Beaumont, Texas. His brother Abdur Jabbar, 24, and his father, Rahim Jabbar, 65, told CNN they are unable to reconcile the attack with the kind and calm person that they knew. “He was very good-natured, he didn’t get angry,” Abdur said in an interview at his home in Beaumont. “That’s why it was so unbelievable that he was capable of something like this.”
The suspect would have had a relatively “normal” lifegraduating in the IT field and having worked at the consultancy companies Deloitte and Accenture. However, he had already had some problems with the law, having served a 9-month “community supervision” sentence for robbery. He was also convicted of driving under the influence of alcohol.
Meta’s glasses
At the time of the attack, the terrorist was wearing Meta artificial intelligence glasses. These are able to do live video broadcasts. However, according to , Jabbar, who was shot at the scene by the police, did not activate them.
Now, the FBI says that on October 31st, Jabbar recorded a video with the glasses while walking around the neighborhood French and planned the attack, he guarantees Lyonel Myrthil, FBI special agent in charge of the New Orleans field office.
According to the AP, these Meta glasses (Mark Zuckerberg’s company, owner of Facebook, Instagram, among other social networks), manufactured in partnership with Ray-Ban, are frames with a built-in camera, speakers and artificial intelligence which can be controlled with voice, buttons and some simple gestures.
The camera allows Meta’s AI assistant to see what the user is seeing, allowing it to translate text into multiple languages and answer simple questions like search for the closest landmark to your location. The glasses are largely a hands-free experience, so the user speaks to the device and it responds to them.
