Philadelphia Police Department image shows Edward Archer who allegedly shot a policeman while claiming to have pledged allegiance to the group that calls itself the Islamic State.
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Prosecutors on Saturday charged the man police say attempted to execute an officer Thursday night with attempted murder, aggravated assault, reckless endangerment and other charges.
Police said Edward Archer, 30, fired 13 rounds from a stolen police firearm at Officer Jessie Hartnett while the cop was sitting in his patrol auto late Thursday.
Court records show he pleaded guilty in 2014 to assault and carrying an unlicensed gun, charges that got him a prison sentence of between nine and 23 months.
The alleged assailant was armed with a 9mm Glock 17 that was reported stolen from the home of a police officer in 2013.
“The archers have dealt bitterly with him, and shot at him, and hated him”.
Hartnett, 33, was shot three times in the arm and will require multiple surgeries, but was listed in stable condition at a hospital.
Neighbor Natalie King, 68, a retired public worker, said she had seen the man she knew as “Eddie” going to the mosque every Friday.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations, the leading U.S. Muslim advocacy group, on Friday said Archer “does not appear” to be an observant Muslim. “We asked him to get medical help”, she told the newspaper.
The “operational alert” warns officers “to have greater awareness of their surroundings in regard to the events that occurred in Philadelphia”, said Dan Keashen, a spokesman for the county force.
Police say an officer was working a detail, at Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, for Officer Jesse Hartnett who was shot and wounded in the line of duty on Thursday.
Police commissioner Richard Ross, speaking to reporters Friday, said Archer told detectives he “believes that the police defend laws that are contrary to the teaching of the Koran”. Other officers assisted in pursuing and arresting Archer.
Archer’s mother told a newspaper he had been hearing voices recently.
Later in the same broadcast, Megyn Kelly drew a sharp distinction between how the “straight shooting” police chief described the attack and what the politically correct mayor had to say in the same press conference. “ISIS needs to be destroyed”, Abdulsalaam said, using an acronym for Islamic State militants who have seized parts of Iraq and Syria, declared war on the West and proclaimed a “caliphate” that would rule over all Muslims.
The female tipster Saturday told police that Archer had attended a mosque in Philadelphia, but became more radical after switching to another mosque nearby.
He is being held without bail, the District Attorney’s Office said.
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Rep. Patrick Meehan (D., Pa.) praised Hartnett’s “tremendous heroism” and said he found Archer’s statements about the Islamic State “troubling”, and called for federal investigators to investigate any possible ties to “overseas radical groups”.
