Family members of the man who authorities say carried out a deadly attack in New Orleans on New Year’s Day are surprised by the allegations.
“I never would have thought it’d be him,” Abdur-Rahim Jabbar, a younger half-brother of the suspect, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, said. “It’s completely unlike him.
“It’s completely contradictory to who he was and how his family and his friends know him.”
Authorities say Shamsud-Din Jabbar took a rented pickup truck in the early hours of Jan. 1 and plowed into a crowd in New Orleans.
The attack left 15 people, including Shamsud-Din Jabbar, dead. Dozens of others were wounded.
“This was an act of terrorism,” Christopher Raia, an FBI official, told reporters the following day. Raia added later that the attack was premeditated and evil.
Shamsud-Din Jabbar recently posted videos online expressing support for ISIS, the Islamic terrorist group, and saying he had joined the group, according to the FBI. They said he discussed planning to harm family and friends but opted to hurt strangers instead because he was concerned headlines about the attack would not focus on the “war between the believers and disbelievers.”
Ali Soufan, a former FBI agent who investigated terrorism cases and is on an advisory council to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, said Jabbar, who was in his 40s and served for about 10 years in the U.S. Army, did not fit the typical profile of those radicalized by ISIS.
“This is a guy who … went from being a patriot to being an ISIS terrorist,” said Soufan.
Relatives said Shamsud-Din Jabbar converted to Islam while he was a child. Abdur-Rahim Jabbar said that his brother abandoned the faith in his 20s or 30s but had recently renewed it.
Abdur-Rahim Jabbar said he had no idea when his half-brother, who was born and raised in Beaumont, Texas, had become radicalized.
The men’s father, Rahim Abdal Jabbar, told The Wall Street Journal that he put his own legal problems, including drug charges, in the past and that he raised his five sons “to be antiviolence.”
Abdur-Rahim Jabbar said that he had bonded with his brother in recent years after their father suffered a stroke and that he had not seen the videos his brother allegedly posted online before the attack.
“He’s the last person I’d expect to do something like this,” he told the Journal.
Shamsud-Din Jabbar was killed after he crashed his vehicle and engaged in a shootout with law enforcement officers, according to authorities.
Requests to Jabbar’s mother for comment were not returned.
Jabbar was married at least three times over the past two decades and had at least three children who were mentioned in divorce and custody agreements. His two most recent marriages, in Georgia and Texas, each lasted about three years, according to court documents.
Dwayne Marsh, who is married to one of Jabbar’s ex-wives, told The New York Times that Jabbar had been acting erratically in recent months and cut his hair after his apparent re-conversion to Islam.
Marsh said he and his wife had stopped allowing the two daughters, aged 15 and 20, she shared with Jabbar to spend time with him.
Marsh did not return a voicemail.
Divorce records also show that Jabbar faced a deteriorating financial situation in January 2022. Jabbar said he was $27,000 behind on house payments and wanted to quickly finalize the divorce.
“I have exhausted all means of bringing the loan current other than a loan modification, leaving us no alternative but to sell the house or allow it to go into foreclosure,” he wrote in a January 2022 email to his now-ex-wife’s attorney.
The businesses owned by the military veteran were struggling, too, including one that lost about $28,000 in 2021.
The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
From The Epoch Times