New Orleans attack: Biden says US ‘will relentlessly pursue’ Islamic State

US President Joe Biden has said that his administration will “relentlessly” pursue the ISIS angle in the New Orleans attack that killed 15 people on New Year’s Day.

Earlier this week, an Islamic State supporter Shamsud Din Jabbar, rammed a pickup truck into a crowd of New Year revellers in New Orleans, killing 15 and injuring 35 others.

“We are going to relentlessly pursue ISIS and other terrorist organisations where they are and they will find no safe harbor here,” Biden said, adding that Jabbar had also died in the attack along with the 15 victims.

POTUS also informed that apart from Jabbar, no one else was involved in the attack.

“As I said yesterday, the attacker posted several videos just several hours before the attack indicating his strong support for ISIS. Federal law enforcement and the intelligence community are actively investigating any foreign or domestic contacts and connections that could possibly be relevant to the attack,” he said.

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‘100% inspired by ISIS’

Despite initial concerns that Shamsud-Din Jabbar, 42, had accomplices still on the run, preliminary investigations show he likely acted alone, FBI deputy assistant director Christopher Raia said.

However, new evidence emerged detailing the extent of the US citizen’s loyalty to Islamic State and his plans to cause mayhem in the early morning attack in New Orleans’s French Quarter entertainment district, ending only after he was shot in a gunbattle with police.

“He was 100 per cent inspired by ISIS,” Raia said, using an alternative name for the international jihadist group.

Raia said Jabbar had planted two homemade bombs in drinks coolers in French Quarter streets.

The bombs were viable – and according to President Joe Biden had remote detonators – but were made safe in time, Raia said.

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FBI probes link

Meanwhile, the Federal Bureau of Investigation began investigating whether there was a link between the explosion of a Tesla Cybertruck outside the Trump International Hotel Las Vegas and a New Orleans truck attack which has sent shockwaves across the world.

In a separate incident in Las Vegas, gasoline canisters and large firework mortars were packed into the Cybertruck that burst into flames, leaving a person dead outside the Trump International Hotel.

Regarding a possible connection between the two incidents, Biden said that the investigation is still going on, however, no evidence of such a connection has been found thus far.

With inputs from agencies