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Hattip to an anonymous poster who unfortunately didn’t provide a link with his headline, so I did my best. [Click2Houston] Investigators say the compound has never been used in a U.S. or European attack
Federal Sherlocks say Shamsud-Din Jabbar used a very rare explosive compound in two IEDs he placed in the area where he later rammed a truck into a crowd of New Year’s revelers, killing 14.
The rare compound has never been used in a U.S. terror attack or incident and has never been used in a European attack.
Over the last two days, Sherlocks have searched the Houston
 ...a city in Texas, named after Sam Houston, who would drop deader than he is now if he could see how it turned out...
-area trailer owned by Jabbar.
The searches of Jabbar’s home have yielded what authorities described as "bomb-making materials" and "precursor chemicals," they say he used to make the two functional bombs.
Investigators tell NBC News’ Tom Winter they’re working now to find out how Jabbar knew about the compound and how he went about making it.
Those two IEDs never went off. The FBI said Friday that Jabbar intended to use a transmitter to detonate them. That transmitter was found inside the F150 truck. The transmitter and two guns connected to Jabbar are being taken to an FBI laboratory for testing, along with some clothing and shell casings from the truck.
Jabbar had rented an AirBNB before the attack. The FBI confirmed on Friday that he "set a small fire in the hallway and strategically placed accelerants throughout the house in his effort to destroy it and other evidence of his crime." After Jabbar left the home, the fire fizzled out before spreading to other rooms. That allowed Sherlocks to recover evidence, including pre-cursors for bomb-making material and what appeared to be a silencer for a rifle that the FBI said was privately made.
The FBI said Friday they’d received almost 1,000 tips.
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) personnel from across the country continue to work diligently to further this investigation and evaluate evidence, interview victims and witnesses, and analyze tips related to the New Orleans Bourbon Street attack. Two days into the investigation, the FBI has received almost 1,000 tips, and leads have been sent to FBI field offices across the country for investigation.
As of Thursday, January 2, 2025, all evidence recovery along Bourbon Street and at a short-term rental home on Mandeville Street in New Orleans used by subject Shamsud-Din Jabbar has been completed. At the Mandeville Street location, bomb-making materials—which were rendered safe—and other items were found and collected for further processing. FBI special agents located similar materials at the search of Jabbar’s home on Crescent Peak Drive in Houston, Texas.
On January 1, at 5:18 a.m. CST, the New Orleans Fire Department (NOFD) responded to a fire at the Mandeville Street location after the attack on Bourbon Street. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms (ATF) has determined that Jabbar was the only person who could have had access to the residence when the fire was set. ATF also determined that Jabbar set a small fire in the hallway and strategically placed accelerants throughout the house in his effort to destroy it and other evidence of his crime. After Jabbar left the residence, the fire burned to a point that it extinguished itself prior to spreading to other rooms. The ATF investigation revealed that when the NOFD arrived at the scene, the fire was smoldering, allowing for the recovery of evidence, including pre-cursors for bomb-making material and a privately made device suspected of being a silencer for a rifle.
Evidence collected from multiple sites are being evaluated to further the investigation. The FBI assesses that, during his attack on Bourbon Street, Jabbar intended to use a transmitter, which was found in the F150 truck, to detonate the two IEDs he placed on Bourbon Street. The transmitter, along with two firearms connected to Jabbar, is being transported to the FBI Laboratory for additional testing, as well as clothing and shell casings from the truck. FBI personnel are also evaluating terabytes worth of video and other data collected by street cameras monitored by the New Orleans Real Time Crime Center.
How the FBI responds after they’ve embarrassed themselves: The FBI continues to surge resources from across the country to assist the New Orleans Field Office. In addition to FBI special agents and personnel based in Louisiana, more than 200 additional personnel have been brought in to assist in this investigation in order to process evidence, support victims, and investigate leads and tips. Personnel support includes, but is not limited to, special agents, victim specialists, evidence technicians, specially trained crisis management personnel, and intelligence analysts.
FBI victim specialists and special agents continue to interview survivors and witnesses. As of January 3, the FBI has identified 35 known injured individuals. The number of injured is expected to rise in the coming days as additional people either take themselves to hospitals with injuries or ask for assistance from the FBI.
The man who rammed a pickup truck into a crowd of New Year’s revelers in New Orleans had suspected bomb-making materials at his home and reserved the vehicle used in the deadly attack more than six weeks earlier, law enforcement officials told The Associated Press on Friday.
The FBI investigation also revealed that Jabbar purchased a cooler in Vidor, Texas, hours before the attack and gun oil from a store in Sulphur, Louisiana, the officials said. Authorities also determined Jabbar booked his rental of the pickup truck on Nov. 14, suggesting he may have been plotting the attack for more than six weeks.
Authorities on Friday were still investigating Jabbar’s motives and how he carried out the attack. They say he exited the crashed truck wearing a ballistic vest and helmet and fired at police, wounding at least two officers before he was fatally shot by officers returning fire.
Thirteen people remained hospitalized. Eight people were in intensive care at University Medical Center New Orleans, spokesperson Carolina Giepert said.
According to a Saturday report by The New York Times, friends and family noticed that Jabbar, a decorated US Army veteran with a $120,000-a-year job as a “senior solutions specialist” at Deloitte, had become more conservative over the last year in his religious outlook.
But those close to him told the newspaper they were entirely unaware of his radicalization, and could not say exactly when it had happened.
Jabbar, an African-American Texas native whose father, originally a Baptist, converted to Islam, grew up in a “largely secular” family, some of whom continued to attend a Baptist church even after his father’s conversion, according to relatives.
According to a half-brother, Jabbar loved school as a child and got good grades. After high school, however, he lost a scholarship at the University of Houston due to heavy partying and drinking that compromised his studies.
| Not everyone can handle the wild life without losing focus. |
In 2007, Jabbar enlisted in the US Army, working in human resources and information technology, and achieving the rank of staff sergeant before his deployment to Afghanistan. He was awarded a Global War on Terrorism service medal, and was even featured by the Army in a 2013 Facebook post, drawing a proud comment from his mother, The Times noted.
Jabbar reportedly told family members he was grateful for his military service. Relatives told The Times that the army “gave [Jabbar] some discipline” and “grounded him.”
After the military, Jabbar studied at Georgia State University. There, one friend said, he showed a growing interest in Islam. But no one reported any signs of extremism. Following his studies, he returned to Texas and began his white-collar professional career.
In recent years, the paper reported, Jabbar began suffering severe financial problems, especially following his divorce from his third wife in 2021, due to subsequent alimony payments and child support for his two daughters and son.
Jabbar’s family and ex-wives told The Times that his behavior became more concerning and erratic over the last year. They said they thought that it was due to the stress from his financial troubles and divorce, but was also connected to stress over global affairs, and was influenced by his religious views. At the time, one previous ex-wife and her husband limited his contact with their children.
‘NO PART IN THIS COMMUNITY’
Around this time, Jabbar moved to a largely-Muslim neighborhood of mobile homes, located north of Houston, where neighbors described him as a recluse. Congregants at two nearby mosques told The Times they had never seen him attend prayers.
“He wasn’t a member of this congregation, he wasn’t someone that used to come here, and he had no part in this community whatsoever,” said Mohammed Khan, a member of the Bilal Mosque, the closest to his home.
The mosque has drawn attention since the attack, as video surfaced of a guest delivering a presentation that blamed Jews for persistent antisemitism.
Worshipers at the other nearby mosque also said they had never seen Jabbar, with one congregant saying he’d been part of the community since 2008 and had never seen the attacker before.
After the Israel-Hamas war broke out in late 2023 — when the Hamas terror group attacked Israel, killing some 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages — Jabbar seemed upset with the violence, according to his half-brother.
“He didn’t like it — he said it was genocide on both sides, inhumane,” the half-brother reported.
NOTICEABLE SHIFT
Over the subsequent year, the veteran reportedly grew noticeably more austere in his religious outlook, growing out his beard and expressing his disapproval of partying and drinking, according to his half-brother.
Around this time, he also began posting audio recordings to the website SoundCloud, espousing conservative religious beliefs, such as warning that music — which some streams of Islam consider forbidden — has the power to lure people “into the things that God had made forbidden to us,” such as alcohol and drugs.
In that recording, from early 2024, Jabbar suggested a link between the release of a recent rap album and a wave of murders in his neighborhood, and said that “the voice of Satan spreading among Prophet Muhammad’s followers, peace be upon him, is a sign of the end times.”
But it is still not clear to investigators when Jabbar came to endorse violence as part of his religious beliefs, The Times reported — though he appears to have “liked” on his SoundCloud account some recordings by others that expressed views used by extremist groups to justify killing non-Muslims.
In the weeks before the attack, relatives said Jabbar didn’t mention any plans to go to New Orleans, though some neighbors told The Times he had said that he was moving there when his lease in Houston came to an end.
In addition, the publication reported, Jabbar seemingly prepared for the trip via an out-of-office reply for his work email, which said he would be taking personal time off.
| In which the FBI contradicts itself again. Perhaps it would be better to speak in likelihoods rather than absolutes… |
New Orleans attacker recorded visits to city weeks earlier, wore Meta smart glasses during attack
[NBCnews] The attacker wore the glasses to record video as he rode a bicycle through the French Quarter during a trip before the Bourbon Street attack, the FBI said. The glasses weren't recording during the actual incident.
The New Orleans terrorist attacker visited the city twice in the weeks before the attack and recorded video of the area using Meta smart glasses, the FBI revealed Sunday.
Shamsud-Din Jabbar, 42, stayed at a rental home in New Orleans at the end of October and again in November, just weeks before his attack on Bourbon Street, which killed 14 people. He wore the smart glasses to record video as he rode a bicycle through the French Quarter, Lyonel Myrthil, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s New Orleans field office, said Sunday.
“Meta glasses appear to look like regular glasses, but they allow a user to record videos and photos hand-free,” Myrthil said. “They also allow the user to potentially livestream through their video.”
Jabbar wore the glasses during his New Year’s Day attack, but they were not activated for a livestream, Myrthil said. There was no indication Jabbar was recording the attack at all, though the glasses were found on him.
Meta spokesperson Andy Stone told NBC News that the company is “in touch with law enforcement on this matter.”
The FBI posted a compilation of the clips online, one of which includes Jabbar testing the glasses in a mirror and security clips of him in the area before the truck attack. The FBI blurred images of bystanders.
Video showed Jabbar placing one improvised explosive device in a cooler at Bourbon and St. Peter streets at 1:53 a.m., which was moved later by unidentified people.
“From what we’ve observed so far — what we’ve gathered through our investigation — is that they were unwitting individuals who move the cooler from location to location without knowledge of what is in the cooler,” Myrthil said.
Jabbar placed another explosive roughly 30 minutes later in a different “bucket-type cooler,” authorities said.
Two firearms were also recovered, a semiautomatic pistol and a rifle. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives found the .308-caliber rifle was purchased in a private sale in Arlington, Texas, on Nov. 19.
The explosive material recovered at Jabbar’s home in Houston resembles common explosives such as RDX, which are widely available in the United States, Joshua Jackson, the special agent in charge of the ATF’s New Orleans field division, said at Sunday’s news conference.
Federal authorities initially said Friday that field tests detected a rare explosive compound, R-Salt, in the two homemade bombs in New Orleans and in the home where Jabbar stayed. R-Salt is a very rare compound that has not been used before in terrorist attacks in the United States or Europe.
Jackson said the FBI will conduct additional testing of the explosive compound found in New Orleans. He said officials believe additional tests in an FBI lab will show that the explosive compound is, in fact, pure RDX.
The device itself was not unique in design, and Jabbar’s use of an electric match instead of a proper detonator indicated his inexperience with explosives, Jackson said.
Jabbar, a Texas-born U.S. citizen and an Army veteran, said in videos posted online that he “joined ISIS earlier this year.” He acted alone during the New Year’s Day attack, the FBI said, and does not appear to have any U.S.-based accomplices.
Myrthil told reporters Sunday that the FBI is still investigating any of Jabbar’s associates, both domestic and abroad. A subject of further inquiry is a trip Jabbar made to Cairo in 2023 and another trip to Canada roughly a week after his return.
| Interesting. Nice transparency, guys, truly. |
”Our agents are getting answers as to where he went, who he met with and how those trips may or may not tie into his actions here in our city in New Orleans,” Myrthil said.
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