Police said that the attacker had mentioned Allah and asked at least one victim if he was Muslim.
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One of the victims wounded in a stabbing at a central Minnesota mall says the man who carried out the attack showed no emotion and his eyes looked blank.
All nine victims suffered injuries that were not life-threatening.
The motive of the Saturday attack is still unclear, but FBI Special Agent-in-Charge Rick Thornton said on Sunday that the stabbings were being investigated as a “potential act of terrorism”. Authorities were digging into Adan’s background and possible motives, looking at social media accounts and electronic devices and talking to his associates, Thornton said.
The attack occurred around 8 p.m. inside the Crossroads Mall in St. Cloud, Minnesota, about 70 miles northwest of Minneapolis.
Hours earlier, a pipe bomb exploded in a Jersey Shore garbage can shortly before a scheduled charity race benefiting Marines and Navy sailors.
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.
Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton planned to travel to St Cloud to meet with the city’s mayor and other local officials on Monday morning to discuss the case. They said the suspect does not represent the larger Somali community, and they expressed fear about backlash over the attack.
Ahmed Adan told the Star Tribune of Minneapolis that police told him Saturday night that his son, Dahir A. Adan, died at Crossroads Center mall in St. Cloud.
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, but has seen allegiances switching increasingly from al-Shabab to Islamic State, Greenberg said. Terror recruiters have targeted young Somalis. The problem first surfaced in 2007, when more than 20 young men went to Somalia, where Ethiopian troops propping up a weak United Nations -backed government were seen by many as foreign invaders. Another dozen or so have left in recent years to join similar militants operating in Syria.
The attack in Minnesota not only hit close to home for local law enforcement, but also those at the mall. Stopping recruiting has been a high priority, with law enforcement investing countless hours in community outreach and the state participating in a federal project created to combat radical messages.
For years, law enforcement officials have anxious that young Somalis who embrace radical messages might carry out violence in the U.S. While the motive in Saturday’s stabbings isn’t yet known, if it turns out to be a terrorist attack, it would be the first carried out by a Somali on U.S. soil, said Karen Greenburg, director of the Center on National Security at Fordham University School of Law.
Federal investigators say they’re looking at the attack as a potential act of terrorism after the Islamic State claimed the suspect had heeded its calls for attacks in countries that are part of a USA -led anti-Islamic State coalition.
It was not immediately clear if the extremist group had planned Saturday’s attack or knew about it beforehand.
A Somali father in an interview with the Minnesota Star Tribune has identified his son as the attacker, although authorities have yet to confirm the identification, the Associated Press reported. Police said multiple people were injured at the St. Cloud shopping mall on Saturday evening in an attack possibly involving both shooting and stabbing.
According to Anderson, most of the encounters were for minor traffic violations, none of which led to an arrest.
Adan was employed by the security firm Securitas, and was assigned for a few months to an Electrolux factory near the mall, Electrolux spokeswoman Eloise Hale said.
A spokesman for St. Cloud State University confirmed that Adan was a student there, but has not been enrolled since the spring semester. All have been released.
Five minutes after authorities received the first 911 call, Jason Falconer, a part-time officer in the city of Avon, shot and killed the attacker.
The Crossroads Mall reopened at 10 a.m. Monday.
Sydney Weires told the St. Cloud Times that she and her friends were walking down a hallway toward Sears when they heard a loud scream.
“He was screaming at us, ‘get the F out!'” she said about one of the men, according to the paper. Makarrall says she saw people walking around inside with blood on them.
When the last shot was sacked, the suspect was so close to Falconer that Falconer was falling backwards as the suspect came at him, Kleis said.
Avon Police Chief Corey Nellis said at a news conference Monday that Jason Falconer “was the person who needed to be there”.
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Another witness, Harley Exsted, said he and his wife were in St. Cloud on Saturday to watch their son play in a college golf tournament, according to the St. Cloud Times.
