“The executor of the stabbing attacks in Minnesota yesterday was a soldier of the Islamic State and carried out the operation in response to calls to target the citizens of countries belonging to the crusader coalition”.
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The FBI said the stabbings were being investigated as a potential act of terrorism.
The statement posted online Sunday by the Amaq agency follows a pattern of ISIS-related media claiming responsibility for what appear to be the acts of individuals across Europe in the past few months.
The spokesman of the Islamic State, Abu Muhammad al-Adnani this summer advised his followers overseas to carry out jihad at home.
St. Cloud Mayor David Kleis said during a hastily arranged news conference in his city’s police headquarters that Falconer’s “life was clearly in danger” during what had been an uneventful shopping trip for the part-time officer in Avon, Minn. Initially officers reported a total of eight victims but one victim drove himself to the hospital later and was initially unknown to authorities. He said police said nothing to him about the mall attack, and that he had “no suspicion” that his son had been involved in terrorist activity, the newspaper reported.
But late Saturday night, Anderson pointedly declined to call the attacks an act of terrorism, saying the motive isn’t yet known. They say the attacker stabbed nine people Saturday night before an off-duty police officer shot and killed him.
Jaylani Hussein, executive director in Minnesota of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, called the attack an “isolated incident”. Other officers were searching shrubbery near the mall with flashlights, according to St. Cloud Times staffers on the scene.
Investigators are looking for possible connections among the Saturday attacks but so far have not found any links. “This could happen in any community in this country, and certainly we have seen it happen”.
The Minnesota attack came as 29 people were injured in a bomb blast in a busy NY neighborhood. Authorities have given no indication that the attacks were connected.
The Crossroads Center Mall in St. Cloud is closed the morning after at least eight people were attacked in a stabbing.
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.
Hours after the incident, groups of shoppers huddled inside the mall’s food court.
The ISIL-affiliated news agency Amaq says one of the group’s followers carried out the stabbing attack that wounded at least eight people at a shopping mall in the USA state of Minnesota on Saturday. “And right now, we’re trying to get to the bottom of his motivations”.
“All of a sudden I heard pop pop pop”, Harley told the paper. “I think anyone could have told you, looking at what was occurring in Europe, that ISIS has made clear that they wanted the U.S.to be the next stop, and it was just a matter of time before unfortunately another incident occurred. There were no notifications in the mall at all, it was just people running and screaming”. “I just saw everybody running away”.
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St. Cloud is a city of 67,000 residents that is located 65 miles (105 kilometers) from the state’s largest metropolitan area, Minneapolis-St.
