FBI Believes Bourbon Street Suspect Acted Alone: Updates
The suspected attacker has been identified as 42-year-old Shamsud-Din Jabbar, a U.S. citizen and Army veteran from Texas. He had an ISIS flag in the truck, was dressed in military gear, and possessed an assault rifle, a handgun, and what may have been an improvised explosive device. The FBI says two other potential IEDs had been found. New Orleans police have searched every street in the French Quarter for suspicious packages.
The suspect rented the white Ford F-150 Lightning pickup he used in the attack using the car-sharing platform Turo. KUT News reports that Jabbar lived in Northwest Houston, where police visited his last known address on Wednesday:
Jabbar started a handful of realty businesses in Texas, Secretary of State records show. Two of them went defunct within the last couple of years.
In a YouTube video for one of these businesses posted four years ago, Jabbar says he was born and raised in Beaumont, Texas, and spent all his life in the state except for his time in the military. He said his 10 years in the military is “where I learned the meaning of great service and what it means to be responsive and take everything seriously, dotting i’s and crossing t’s, to make sure that things go off without a hitch.”
A Georgia State University spokesperson confirmed Jabbar attended the school from 2015 until 2017, and graduated with a B.B.A. in Computer Information Systems.
NOLA.com spoke with his landlord, who confirmed that Jabbar rented a mobile home in Houston two years ago and later told her of his plans to move to New Orleans.
The Wall Street Journal describes Jabbar’s tumultuous personal life, writing that he separated from his first wife in 2012 and that she was granted custody of their two children while he was ordered to provide health insurance and pay child support. Per the outlet, his second marriage was even more contentious, with Jabbar filing for divorce from Shaneen Jabbar in 2020 after three years:
Days later, Shaneen Jabbar was granted a restraining order, forbidding Shamsud-Din Jabbar from sending threatening or obscene messages to her or causing “bodily injury” to her or their child. The order stated that he couldn’t make late-night prank calls, cancel her credit cards and other abusive acts. Shaneen Jabbar was ordered to refrain from the same things. She couldn’t be reached for comment.
The following month, the couple moved jointly to dismiss the divorce petition. But in 2021, Shamsud-Din Jabbar again filed for divorce, and the court granted dissolution the following year. In a statement filed with the court, Jabbar portrayed himself as broke, with net income of around $7,500 and monthly expenses totaling about $8,960.
The Journal also reports that Jabbar worked as a senior solutions specialist for Deloitte and expressed interest in hunting and prayer on his internal profile:
He quoted an English translation of the Quran, from a section known as Al-Insan, or “The Man,” which discusses how faithful Muslims will be rewarded by God. “Indeed, the righteous will drink from a cup whose mixture is of Kafur, A spring of which the servants of Allah will drink,” according to a copy of his profile viewed by The Wall Street Journal. “They will make it gush forth in force. They fulfill vows and fear a Day whose evil will be widespread.”