Dahir A. Adan’s family identified him as the suspect in the mall stabbing.Monday morning, Electrolux Home Products’ spokeswoman Eloise Hale said Monday that the man was an employee of the security firm Securitas and was temporarily assigned to the Electrolux store in St. Cloud’s Crossroads Center mall.The man, whom local media reports said was of Somali descent, stabbed nine people at the Minnesota mall before being shot dead by an off-duty police officer.
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St. Cloud Police say a suspect stabbed 9 people throughout the mall before an off-duty officer confronted him in Macy’s and shot and killed him.
The stabbing coincided with a bombing in Manhattan that injured 29 people on Saturday, and the discovery of five more bombs near a train station in New Jersey late Sunday night. Authorities have not confirmed a link to any terrorist groups, but a news agency tied to the Islamic State asserted responsibility for the attack, calling Adan was “a soldier of the Islamic State”. His father, speaking through an interpreter, told the Minneapolis Star Tribune that he was 22, but court records and a driver’s license database showed his age as 20.
President Barack Obama said the FBI is investigating the attack in Minnesota as a potential act of terrorism.
Saturday’s attack at Crossroads Center Mall is testing city and community leaders’ efforts to improve longstanding racial tensions, which flared up a few years ago when Somali-American high school students said they were being harassed and being called terrorists.
“That’s not who we are”, said Haji Yusuf, Unitecloud Community director. That’s up from the nine reported earlier, with St. Cloud police saying investigators reviewing security footage discovered a 21-year-old man was injured but did not tell police or seek medical attention due to the nature of his injuries.
“I implore the citizens of St. Cloud and the citizens of Minnesota to rise above this incident and remember our common humanity”, Mr Dayton said. Of the nine victims – seven men, a woman and a 15-year-old girl – three remained hospitalized, officials said.
Minnesota has the nation’s largest Somali community.
The city of St. Cloud is located about 65 miles northwest of Minneapolis. Abdul Kulane, of the Central Minnesota Community Empowerment Organization, said he was contacted by Aden’s parents, who did not know what drove their son to carry out the attack.
The attorney for Dahir Adan’s family declined to answer questions Monday night in St. Cloud, but did read a statement from the family.
Falconer said he’s not going to talk publicly about the incident until the investigation is over. Many of them are young Somali-American men. Associated Press writers Kyle Potter, Steve Karnowski and John Mone contributed from St. Cloud, Minnesota.
In a statement, mall officials said they were “devastated by the events that happened at Crossroads Center”. Police said the suspect made references to Allah and asked at least one stabbing victim if he or she was Muslim before assaulting that person.
Assaults in public places have become more frequent in both the US and Canada, and although joint intelligence efforts have made progress in monitoring radical tendencies, there will always be the possibility of another attack occurring at any place, as anyone can become obsessed with the idea of martyrdom and of fighting for a cause that commands the killing of innocents just because they have a different set of beliefs. You would never see him at places where other people hang out.
However, in spite of claims by Isis that Adan was a supporter of the terror group, the authorities said they had found no evidence to that effect.
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Adan had started his third year at St. Cloud State University, according to other relatives who spoke to the Star-Tribune.
