“A man, who made “some references to Allah” stabbed and injured eight people in a shopping mall in the city of St Cloud late Saturday before he was shot dead by an off-duty officer”, police said. Chief of St Cloud Police William Blair Anderson said they still did not have “anything substantive” to support the claim, and that all they knew now was that “this was a lone attacker”, CNN reported.
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The off-duty police officer who shot and killed a man suspected of stabbing nine people in a Minnesota mall is deflecting praise from people who call him a hero.
All nine Minnesota victims – seven men, a woman, and a 15-year-old girl – were treated at hospitals for wounds that weren’t life-threatening, St. Cloud police said at a news conference Sunday.
Anderson said an off-duty police officer from another jurisdiction shot and killed the unidentified suspect, who was armed with a knife and wearing a private security firm uniform at the time of the attack.
Local police had three previous encounters with the suspect, most for minor traffic violations, Anderson said, adding that the FBI had offered to help with the investigation.
“We understand in St. Cloud there is more anti-Muslim organizing and we hope they do not use this incident to divide [our community]”.
In Minnesota, St. Cloud Police Sgt. Jason Burke said victims were transported to nearby hospitals, USA Today reported.
Falconer “was there at the right time and the right place”, St Cloud Mayor Dave Kleis said.
“Whether that was a terrorist attack or not, I’m not willing to say that right now because we just don’t know”, Anderson said at a news conference. “It has also claimed past attacks that are not believed to have been planned by its central leadership”, according to a news release from the police department.
Sydney Weires, Maggie Gelke and Jenna Remmele, students at the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University, were bored on Saturday and chose to go to the mall.
Investigators are looking for possible connections among the Saturday attacks but so far have not found any links. While he confirmed the attacker as Somali, the Minneapolis StarTribune quoted him as saying, authorities have not confirmed the attacker’s ethnicity.
“All of a sudden I heard pop, pop, pop”, Harley Exsted told the St. Cloud Times.
“People came running around the corner, and I freaked out because I thought it was a terrorist attack or something because I saw a lot of people, so I grabbed my kids”, he told the newspaper.
Anthony Bellow, 18, a Technical High School student who recently moved to St. Cloud from Columbus, Ohio, went to the mall to visit his brother Dominic, 21, who works at Target, and was told to leave.
The attack in St. Cloud occurred the same evening that an explosion rocked New York City’s bustling Chelsea district on Saturday, injuring 29 people in what authorities described as a deliberate criminal act.
Hours after the incident, groups of shoppers huddled inside the mall’s food court. “He was screaming at us” to get out. All of a sudden these people started running.
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St. Cloud, a 67,000-person town about 65 miles northwest of Minneapolis, is home to one of Minnesota’s larger immigrant Muslim communities. “Starting tomorrow, St. Cloud will not be the same anymore”.
