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The FBI now says that the pickup truck driver responsible for a deadly rampage in New Orleans acted alone. Officials said on Wednesday that they were seeking additional potential suspects in an attack being investigated as an act of terrorism. But Christopher Raia, deputy assistant director of the FBI's counterterrorism division, said on Thursday that the evidence now shows that Shamsud-Din Jabbar was solely responsible for the attack and professed allegiance to the Islamic State. New Orleans pressed ahead with plans to reopen the city's famed Bourbon Street on Thursday as investigators kept digging into the background of the US Army veteran who drove a pickup truck into a crowd of New Year's revellers, killing 15 people. The FBI said it was investigating the attack, which occurred when 42-year-old Shamsud-Din Jabbar steered around a police blockade, as a terrorist act. Investigators believe the driver was inspired by the Islamic State group. Authorities recovered a black flag of
Eight people from Tajikistan with suspected ties to the Islamic State group have been arrested in the United States in recent days, according to multiple people familiar with the matter. The arrests took place in New York, Philadelphia and Los Angeles and the individuals, who entered the US through the southern border, are being held on immigration violations, said the people, who were not authorised to discuss the ongoing investigation by name and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity. The nature of their suspected connections to the IS was not immediately clear, but the individuals were being tracked by the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force, or JTTF. They were in the custody of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which made the arrests while working with the JTTF, pending proceedings to remove them from the country. The individuals from Tajikistan entered the country last spring and passed through the US government's screening process without turning up ...
The Islamic State extremist group poses a rising threat amid political instability in West Africa and the Sahel and remains intent on carrying out attacks abroad, the U.N. counter-terrorism chief said Thursday. Vladimir Voronkov reiterated U.N. findings that IS continues to pose a significant threat to international peace and security, especially in conflict zones, despite significant progress by U.N. member nations in countering the threat. The group has also increased operations in its former strongholds in Iraq and Syria as well as Southeast Asia, Voronkov said. Voronkov told the U.N. Security Council that in West Africa and the Sahel, a broad region cutting across the continent, the situation has deteriorated and is becoming more complex, as local ethnic and regional disputes cross with the agenda and operations of the extremist group, which is also known by its Arabic name Daesh, and its affiliates. Daesh affiliates continued to operate with increasingly more autonomy from the