The pro-forma “Nothing To Do With Terrorism” announcement, which would be much more convincing if it weren’t for the fact that even self-professed jihadists like Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar have seen their attacks dismissed as having nothing to do with terrorism. “Utah Mall Reopens After Deadly Shooting,” by Paul Foy in the Bismarck Tribune:
SALT LAKE CITY – A shopping mall where five people were gunned down this week reopened Wednesday, as authorities tried to figure out why a teenage Bosnian immigrant committed the rampage and how he got his hands on a gun.
FBI agent Patrick Kiernan, in Salt Lake City, said the bureau had no reason to believe Sulejman Talovic, who was killed by police, was motivated by religious extremism or an act of terrorism.
“It’s just unexplainable,” Kiernan said Wednesday. “He was just walking around and shooting everybody he saw.”…
How such behavior would be inconsistent with an act of jihad violence, or on what basis the Bureau determined that this attack had nothing to do with jihad, Kiernan doesn’t explain.
Investigators said they knew little about Talovic, except that he lived in Salt Lake City with his mother. He was enrolled in numerous city schools before withdrawing in 2004, the school district said.
Talovic and his family moved to the U.S. in 1998, after living as refugees in war-torn Bosnia for five years, people close to the family told The Associated Press. Talovic was only 4 when he and his mother fled their village of Talovici on foot after Serbian forces overran it in 1993, they said.
“Many left the village, but only a few made it,” said Murat Avdic, a friend of the family.
Up to 200,000 people were killed and 1.8 million others lost their homes in Bosnia’s 1992-95 war.
Avdic said he was convinced the war in Talovic’s homeland somehow contributed to the Utah rampage, especially the 1995 slaughter of 8,000 Muslim men and boys by Serb forces in the northeastern enclave of Srebrenica. The boy had been in Srebrenica about two years before the massacre occurred, he said.
Interesting idea. I wonder why Avdic would think that Talovic might decide that shooting people in a shopping mall in Utah would be suitable revenge for Srebrenica.