Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
A pair of suspected terrorist attacks on New Year’s Day were allegedly carried out by former US service members, raising questions about how those with access to sensitive intelligence and the nation’s most advanced weapons are drawn into radical beliefs.
Early Wednesday morning, allegedly Texas resident Shamsud-Din Jabbar plowed into a crowd on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, killing 14. He was a former Army staff sergeant with a deployment to Afghanistan under his belt.
Hours later, a Tesla Cybertruck exploded in flames outside the Trump Hotel in Las Vegas, a suspected active-duty terrorist plot. Army Master Sgt. Matthew Livelsberger, who allegedly carried out the attack that led to his own death while on approved leave. He was a member of the elite Green Beret unit.
From 1990 to 2022, 170 people with US military backgrounds planned 144 unique mass-casualty terrorist attacks in the United States, 25% of all people who planned mass-casualty extremist crimes during that period, according to a study by the Consortium National for the Study of terrorism and responses to terrorism.
Early Wednesday morning, Texas resident Shamsud-Din Jabbar allegedly attacked a crowd on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, killing 14 people. (F.B.I.)
NEW ORLEANS ATTACK: INVESTIGATION CONTINUES AS FBI SAYS NO OTHER SUSPECTS INVOLVED
Questions put to the Defense Department about its plans to identify and eliminate radicals by Fox News Digital went unanswered.
Here’s a look back at another one radical extremist militaries that have carried out attacks on US soil in the 21st century:
2009: Army psychiatrist Nidal Hassan kills 13 people
In 2009, former Army Major Nidal Hassan killed 13 people in a mass shooting at the Fort Hood Army base in Texas. The Islamic extremist and former army psychiatrist had spoken out about the US presence in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Retired Colonel Terry Lee, who worked with Hassan, told Fox News that the army chief would make “outrageous” statements such as: “Muslims should stand up and fight the aggressor,” referring to to US troops.
Hassan reportedly shouted, “Allahu Akbar!” as he opened fire, killing 13 and wounding 30 others in the deadliest mass shooting at a US military base.
Hassan admitted to the killings in court and he is now on death row.
2021: Army soldier Cole James Bridges tries to provide information to ISIS
In 2021, Army Private Bridges, 24, was arrested for conspiracy to blow up the 9/11 memorial in New York and trying to help ISIS kill American soldiers.
Now serving 14 years in prison, Bridges was caught when he began communicating online with an undercover FBI agent he believed to be an ISIS supporter in contact with IS fighters in the East medium
2020: Army soldier Ethan Melzer provides information to neo-Nazi group
Melzer, 24 years old at the time of his sentence, he is serving 45 years in prison for sending confidential US military information to the Order of the Nine Angles (O9A), an occult-based neo-Nazi and white supremacist group, in an attempt to facilitate a mass casualty attack on Melzer’s army unit.
He was arrested in 2020 after joining the military in 2018 to infiltrate their ranks and gain information about their work for O9A. After being deployed to guard a remote and sensitive foreign military base, he shared details about the site with members of O9A and began calling for a deadly attack on his colleagues.
2014: Frazier Glenn Miller kills three off Jewish centers
Miller, a lifelong white supremacist, shot and killed three people, two outside a Jewish community center and one outside a Jewish retirement home, in Kansas in 2014.
Miller had spoken of intending to kill Jews, even though all his victims were Christians.
He served in the military for 20 years, serving two tours of duty in the Vietnam War and 13 years as a member of the elite Green Berets. Having led a branch of the Ku Klux Klan, Miller had a history of run-ins with the law. He served three years in prison after being convicted in 1987 of conspiring to acquire stolen military weapons and planning robberies and murder.
Miller has since died in prison.
WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT THE VICTIMS OF THE NEW ORLEANS TERRORIST ATTACK
2014: Knife-wielding Navy vet Zale Thompson injures police officers
Thompson, a Navy veteran, committed a Salafist-inspired ax attack in Queens, New York in 2014, injuring four police officers. The attack was considered an act of terrorism, as Thompson was a recent Muslim convert. In the months leading up to the attack, he visited hundreds of websites associated with terrorist organizations. Thompson was involuntarily discharged from the Navy in 2003, after being arrested six times between 2002 and 2003 in domestic disputes.
He was killed by police at the scene of the 2014 attack.
2016: Afghanistan war vet Micah Xavier Johnson kills five police officers
In 2016, Johnson ambushed police officers in Dallas, Texaskilling five and wounding nine others. The 25-year-old Army Reserve Afghanistan war veteran was angry about police shootings of black men. He carried out the attack at the end of a protest against the recent killings by the police of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minnesota.
Dallas mourns the killing of five police officers
2020: Three veterans attempt to bomb a Forest Service building
Authorities in Las Vegas arrested Andrew Lynam, an Army reservist, along with Navy veteran Stephen T. Parshall and Air Force veteran William L. Loomis, all self-identified Boogaloo Bois, on May 30 of 2020, for conspiring to bomb a US Forest Service building and an electrical substation to sow chaos during a police protest following the killing of George Floyd.
CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP
In total, 480 people with military backgrounds were charged with ideologically motivated extremist crimes between 2017 and 2023, about 230 of whom were arrested in connection with the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot.
