Art Moore in WND says that investigators are still considering the possibility of jihad terrorism in the Salt Lake mall shootings:
While the FBI stated it has found no evidence Islamic terrorism was a motive in the Salt Lake City mall shooting, investigators have not ruled it out, a police spokeswoman told WND.
FBI agent Patrick Kiernan declared to reporters Wednesday he had no reason to believe the random, dispassionately executed murder of five people by 18-year-old Bosnian Muslim immigrant Sulejman Talovic Monday night had anything to do with Islamic terrorism, calling it “just unexplainable.”
But Salt Lake Police spokeswoman Robin Snyder told WND the FBI is still working with her department on the case, and investigators continue to explore the terrorism angle.
“We will pursue every single lead,” she said. “There is not one lead we are not willing to pursue. At this point, we don’t have any idea of any motive. Nothing is ruled out.”
Snyder told WND, however, she was not aware family members say Talovic often attended Friday prayers at the Al-Noor mosque, about a block from the site of the shooting, according to the Salt Lake Tribune.
Talovic stopped coming to the meetings in December, the paper said yesterday, when, under pressure from his father, he got a full-time job to help support the family.
Bruce Tefft, a former CIA counter-terrorism official who advises the New York City Police Department, told WND he was “flabbergasted” by the FBI’s statement Wednesday that it saw no possible connection to terrorism.
Nevertheless, Tefft – a founding member of the CIA’s counter-terrorism center in 1985 – said the FBI’s quick downplaying of terror ties in such cases is all too frequent and believes spokesman Kiernan probably was embarrassed by his statement.
“It’s almost a joke in any counter-terrorism circles that within half a day of most unexplained incidents the FBI comes out and says it isn’t terrorism,” he said. “They’ll come out with a conclusion based on no information.”…
When the FBI uses extreme groups such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations as sensitivity trainers, “that’s ignorance and political correctness, that’s not a deliberate psychological warfare tactic,” he said.
“I suspect they are just being politically correct to avoid a backlash by Muslims,” said Tefft.
There’s much more to this story, some of which also appears in this. Anyway, it is good that investigators haven’t ruled out the terrorism possibility, but this Salt Lake Tribune story notes that they didn’t take any computers from Talovic’s home:
Salt Lake City police spokeswoman Robin Snyder said Wednesday that police have not discerned a motive or found anything resembling a suicide note. With the permission of Talovic’s parents, detectives searched their home but did not take any computers or video games, she said.