The mayor of St. Cloud just held a press conference with law enforcement authorities on the stabbing rampage at the Crossroads Center mall last night. Other than crediting the off-duty officer who killed the perpetrator (identified as Jason Falconer) with acting promptly at his own risk to to lives, the press conference was remarkably short on information. As late as noon today the Star Tribune seemed to be holding out hope that the perpetrator was not a Somali Muslim waging jihad but someone attacking Muslims (a suggestion now helpfully removed from the current Star Tribune story).
If that were the case, you can bet we would have heard about it at the press conference. The Special Agent in Charge of the FBI Minneapolis office allowed that the incident was being investigated as a potential terrorist attack. I assume they’ll have it figured out before too long, but I inferred from the silence on this point that it was as we thought. Now the Star Tribune reports:
While law enforcement has yet to reveal the name of the suspect, his father identified him as Dahir A. Adan, 22, a student at St. Cloud Technical and Community College. Interviewed Sunday through a translator, Ahmed Aden said his son was born in Africa and had lived in the United States for 15 years.
Police told Ahmed Aden at about 9 p.m. Saturday that his son had died at the mall. He said that he had “no suspicion” of his son being involved in any terror activity. The father added that police raided the apartment on St. Germain street Sunday morning and seized photos and other materials, but they said nothing to him about the stabbings at the mall.
The story wouldn’t be complete without this:
Jaylani Hussein, executive director in Minnesota of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said Sunday afternoon that “we are definitely concerned about the potential for backlash in the community, both in the immediate run and the longer term.”
Hussein went on to call the attack “an isolated incident, and we still don’t know the full facts.”
You may now carry on.
Quotable quote from Governor Mark Dayton: “If true that [the attacks] were motivated by religious bigotry, I condemn them even more strongly. … I ask everyone in the St. Cloud area and throughout Minnesota to rise above this atrocity and act to make religious and racial tolerance one of the ways in which Minnesotans again lead our country.” What an idiot.
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