Jaylani Hussein, executive director of the Center for American-Islamic Relations Minnesota, talks with reporters during a press conference Sunday, Sept. 18, 2016, at Lake George, in St. Cloud, Minn., expressing t. The suspect is believed to be dead, St. Cloud Police Sgt. Jason Burke told the St. Cloud Times.
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Adan was previously enrolled at St. Cloud State University, but was not enrolled this semester.
None of the 10 people wounded suffered life-threatening injuries.
Schliep said that the attacker uttered “not a single word, not even a grunt” during the rampage, was horsing around when he grabbed his first victim.
With potential backlash set to follow the stabbing, Mohamoud Mohamed, a spokesman for the Central Minnesota Islamic Center in St. Cloud, said at the Sunday news conference the Muslim community in central Minnesota has no ties to any Islamic terrorist groups.
We still don’t have anything substantive that would suggest anything more than what we know already, which is this was a lone attacker.
Twenty-two-year-old Dahir Adan was identified as the attacker, who died during the stabbing spree at the Crossroads Mall in St Cloud, Minnesota.
President Barack Obama says there is no apparent connection between the stabbings at a mall in Minnesota and the bombings in NY and New Jersey.
Little is known about Adan, who was identified Sunday by his father, Ahmed Adan, and then by St. Cloud police Monday night.
The man was employed by the security firm Securitas and had worked a temporary assignment that ended in June as a guard at the Electrolux Home Products store in the mall, Eletrolux spokeswoman Eloise Hale said. Adan was wearing a security guard’s uniform during the attack.
As many as 10,000 Somalis have settled in three counties that compose St. Cloud, a city with about 65,000 people, according to estimates from the state demographer.
The Star Tribune pointed out that St. Cloud is home to a concentration of Minnesota’s large immigrant Muslim communities and tensions with some other members of the community has intensified at times. “The last time he went out, he said he was going to buy an iPhone”, Yussuf said.
“We strongly condemn what happened”, said Haji Yussuf, cofounder of the activist group #UniteCloud, during a Sunday news conference. He graduated from Apollo High School in 2014, where he was a skilled athlete in basketball and soccer, said Khader Omar, one of Adan’s Apollo High classmates, who is also Somali.
Ashley Bayne, an employee of JCPenney at the mall, was visiting a coworker at the time of the incident. A 2011 agreement resolved the case, but the U.S. Department of Education still was monitoring the case previous year.
The speed with which IS weighed in may also say something about a competition for recruits between the Middle East-based IS and the east Africa-based militant group al-Shabab, which has recruited Somali-Americans from Minnesota with some success in recent years. If Saturday’s stabbings are ultimately deemed a terrorist act, it would be the first carried out by a Somali on US soil, said Karen Greenburg, director of the Center on National Security at Fordham University School of Law.
Dayton and Lt. Gov. Tina Smith are scheduled to meet with St. Cloud Mayor Dave Kleis on Monday morning. “I am not planning to go anywhere else”, said Fartun Abdulkanim, who came to Fargo in 1996.
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Adan lived in a three-story brick apartment building less than two miles from the mall, where residents said most, if not all, of their neighbors were Somali.
