COLUMBUS, Ohio — A Somali-born student who carried out a car-and-knife attack at Ohio State University might have been inspired by the Islamic State group and a former al-Qaida leader, investigators said Wednesday.
Law enforcement officials said that it’s too soon to say the rampage that hurt 11 people on Monday was terrorism. They said they aren’t aware of any direct contact between the Islamic State group and the attacker, Ohio State student Abdul Razak Ali Artan, 18.
“We only believe he may have been inspired” by the group, said Angela Byers, the top FBI agent overseeing federal investigations in the southern half of Ohio.
Artan also might have been influenced by Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S.-born cleric who took a leadership role in al-Qaida before being killed in a 2011 U.S. drone strike in Yemen, Byers said.
Al-Awlaki has been cited as inspiration by numerous terror suspects over the years, including the brothers who bombed the Boston Marathon, the Army psychiatrist who killed 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas, and, more recently, the man charged in bombings in New York and New Jersey.
Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said investigators are still going through Artan’s electronic devices, but it seems clears he was radicalized online.
He also said there doesn’t seem to be much time between the onset of Artan’s apparent radicalization and the attack, a period known in law enforcement and intelligence circles as “flash to bang.” That trend has disquieted law enforcement officials, who fear disaffected individuals are being inspired to violence after being only briefly exposed to radical ideology.
“This may be one of those cases which was just unpreventable,” he said, adding that there was no evidence yet to suggest Artan had been publicly communicating radical intentions over a long period of time.
