Fatal Shooting at a Utah Mall

[bronco1855]

Wow, I'm right near you Bronco, got back from the mission in 2005. Where in UT county? I didn't know there were other freaks so close by!

I'm glad you're safe too. I just can't imagine this kind of thing right here, let alone in Trolley Square, such a low-key place. Just shocking.

I live in Saratoga Springs

 

[Darthrazz]

This is very,very sad news....My heart and prayers go out to the families of the victims. I guess that there are so many empty people in this world....if only someone had been able to reach out to this young man. There is help and hope out there. Such a senseless act.

 

[carbo-fation]

I hope all of the Utah freaks are safe! My prayers go out with the family of the victims.

 

[pixletwin]

I am OK. My wife and I were supposed to go to the Spaghetti factory last night to celebrate Valentines day but I was up the previous night writing a paper so I was too tired to go. Thank goddness for that essay... Very bad news though... I hope it doens't kill Trolly Square. Glad the Utah Freaks are OK though.

Edit: On a local radio station (X96) they had a guy who was a manger of the store in there. He said the kid who did this had a smile on his face the whole time. Sick people.

 

[Buttmunch]

I am OK. My wife and I were supposed to go to the Spaghetti factory last night to celebrate Valentines day but I was up the previous night writing a paper so I was too tired to go. Thank goddness for that essay... Very bad news though... I hope it doens't kill Trolly Square. Glad the Utah Freaks are OK though.

Edit: On a local radio station (X96) they had a guy who was a manger of the store in there. He said the kid who did this had a smile on his face the whole time. Sick people.

WOW! Glad you are ok and didn't go. Never thought you'd be thankful for writing a paper huh? The Deseret News seems to be the paper with the most pictures and info about last night (just as an FYI).

EDIT: another MSN article now with more information including the name of the shooter.

https://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17124042/

 

[Darth Caedus]

thought mormons were anti-violence?

 

[pixletwin]

thought mormons were anti-violence?

:zzwhip




Not that it really matters but homeboy with a gun wasn't mormon....

 

[mfoga]

What still suprises me is how easy it is to legally carry a firearm in UT.

 

[pixletwin]

What still suprises me is how easy it is to legally carry a firearm in UT.

No joke. Our legislature here is a complete circus.

 

[mfoga]

What I found funny was its easier to carry a gun then it is to get drunk

 

[Fubeca]

No joke. Our legislature here is a complete circus.

Funny thing is the reason why this ended so soon is because of someone else carrying a gun... But we can chat about politics somewhere else...

But here is video from inside while the shooting was happening.
https://www.liveleak.com/view?i=8dbc5_4507&p=1

 

[pixletwin]

Apparently the kid who did it was an immigrant from Bosnia and had witnessed some pretty screwed up things as a kid during the war there; enough to screw anyone up.

 

[mfoga]

Funny thing is the reason why this ended so soon is because of someone else carrying a gun... But we can chat about politics somewhere else...

Wasn't he a off duty cop? Cops normally carry 24/7.

 

[Batty]

Wasn't he a off duty cop? Cops normally carry 24/7.

Right, he was an off-duty cop. They say he probably kept a lot more people from being killed.

 

[LordAzrael]

Apparently the kid who did it was an immigrant from Bosnia and had witnessed some pretty screwed up things as a kid during the war there; enough to screw anyone up.

I think the words you're looking for are "Sudden Jihad Syndrome". You have to search high and low to find out the guy was a Muslim. Most articles just state he was a Bosnian immigrant.

https://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=54286

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."

(Story continues below)

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.


Al Noor mosque in Salt Lake City

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 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 familiar 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."

Kiernan did not reply to WND's request for comment.

Harvey Kushner, a counter-terrorism adviser to the federal government, told WND he also sees the FBI's response as typical.

"It follows a pattern where media, and often even law enforcement itself, would rather dismiss it as an act of a crazed gunman and ignore the person's background, his religious beliefs," said Kushner, chairman of the Department of Criminal Justice at Long Island University and author of "Holy War on the Home Front: The Secret Islamic Terror Network in the United States."

Tefft pointed out, however, the FBI's continued presence in the investigation is an indication the terrorism angle is still being pursued. President Reagan, beginning in 1985, made the FBI the lead agency in all terrorism-related cases, he explained.

Some analysts have posed the possibility that since the objective of terrorism, after all, is to terrorize the public, the U.S. government has attempted to diffuse or take away its effect by publicly dismissing it as a source of violent acts.

Tefft says there is some logic to that, but believes if it were true, it "would show more intelligence in the psychological warfare arena than we've shown to date."

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.

Kushner said that often, when a story such as the Salt Lake shooting is no longer on the front pages of the paper, the FBI will change the analysis of the act and label it terrorism.

One example, he said, was the case of Hesham Mohamed Hadayet, an Egyptian national who killed two people and wounded three others July 4, 2002, at a ticket counter for the Israeli national airline El Al at Los Angeles International Airport. Shortly after the incident, an FBI spokesman said "there's nothing to indicate terrorism," and another FBI official said, "It appears he went there with the intention of killing people. Why he did that we are still trying to determine." Later, the agency ruled it a terrorist attack.

Kushner pointed to a number of cases dating back to the early 1990s of men who became increasingly radicalized under the influence of Islamism and confounded friends and relatives with an act of cold-blooded violence aimed at random victims.

The Salt Lake killer was praised as a good, quiet person by family, and his father, Suljo Talovic, told local KUTV-TV he couldn't make sense of his son's violence.

"I think somebody push him. I don't know. I'm almost crazy with what happened," he said. "Maybe somebody sell gun or give gun."

Sulejman Talovic's aunt, Ajka Omerovic, discounted theories he may have had lingering psychological effects from the war in Bosnia, telling the Salt Lake Tribune: "We all suffered things in war, but, no, we didn't have anything."

Recent examples of what Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes has termed "Sudden Jihad Syndrome" include Naveed Afzal Haq of Pasco, Wash., who broke through security at the Jewish Federation Center in Seattle last July and announced to staff members: "I'm a Muslim American; I'm angry at Israel." The 30-year-old immediately began shooting randomly, killing a woman and wounding five others. An FBI spokesman called it a case of a "lone individual acting out his antagonism. ... There's nothing to indicate that it’s terrorism-related."

Last March, 22-year-old Iranian student Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar went on a driving rampage on the campus of the University of North Carolina, injuring nine people. As Islam scholar Robert Spencer, director of Jihad Watch, notes, the Iranian said in a court appearance he was "thankful for the opportunity to spread the will of Allah." He also wrote letters to newspapers presenting Quranic justification for his attacks, but officials ruled out terrorism.

In October 2005, 21-year-old student Joel Hinrichs blew himself up outside the University of Oklahoma's football stadium where 84,000 were watching a game. Police insisted it was merely a suicide, but investigators found "Islamic Jihad" material in his apartment, and he reportedly attended a nearby mosque – the same one attended by Zacharias Moussaoui, the only person charged in connection with the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

In January 2004, after apparently undergoing a religious awakening, a Saudi Arabian student in Houston killed his Jewish friend by slashing his throat. Mohammed Ali Alayed, 23, pleaded guilty to the Aug. 6 attack on Ariel Sellouk, also 23, who almost was decapitated with a knife. Houston police said no clear motive had been established, but Alayed went to a local mosque after the slaying.

In a high-profile case, Beltway sniper John Allen Muhammad, a convert to Islam, went on a deadly shooting spree in the Washington, D.C., area in October 2002.

Another good article about this sort of thing that doesn't really make the MSM

https://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=26961

Talovic joins an unfortunately growing list of Muslims who have committed random acts of violence, only for officials to assure us that their actions have nothing to do with terrorism. Maybe none of them do, but the list is full of troubling details:



* On January 31, Ismail Yassin Mohamed, 22, stole a car in Minneapolis. He went on a rampage, ramming the stolen car into other cars and then stealing a van and continuing to ram other cars, injuring one person. His father told officials that Mohamed was suffering from mental problems; his mother added he had been depressed and hadn’t been taking his medication. During his rampage, Mohamed repeatedly yelled, “Die, die, die, kill, kill, kill,” and when asked why he did all this, he replied, “Allah made me do it.”
* Omeed Aziz Popal, a Muslim from Afghanistan, who killed one person and injured fourteen during a murderous drive through San Francisco city streets in August 2006, during which he targeted people on crosswalks and sidewalks, identified himself as a terrorist after his rampage, according to Rob Roth of San Francisco’s KTVU. Later the murders were ascribed to Popal’s mental problems, and to stress arising from his impending arranged marriage.
* On July 28, 2006, a Muslim named Naveed Afzal Haq forced his way into the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle. Once inside, Haq announced, “I’m a Muslim American; I’m angry at Israel,” and then began shooting, killing one woman and injuring five more. FBI assistant special agent David Gomez stated: “We believe...it’s a lone individual acting out his antagonism. There’s nothing to indicate that it’s terrorism-related. But we're monitoring the entire situation.”
* In March 2006, a twenty-two-year-old Iranian student named Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar drove an SUV onto the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, deliberately trying to kill people and succeeding in injuring nine. After the incident, he seemed singularly pleased with himself, smiling and waving to crowds after a court appearance on Monday, at which he explained that he was “thankful for the opportunity to spread the will of Allah.” Officials here again dismissed the possibility of terrorism, even after Taheri-azar wrote a series of letters to the UNC campus newspaper detailing the Qur’anic justification for warfare against unbelievers, and explaining why he believed his attacks were justified from an Islamic perspective.

None of these were terrorist attacks in the sense that they were planned and executed by al-Qaeda agents. And it is possible that all of them were products of nothing more ideologically significant than a disturbed mental state, although it is at least noteworthy that each attacker explained his actions in terms of Islamic terrorism. As such attacks grow in number, it would behoove authorities at very least to consider the possibility that these attacks were inspired by the jihadist ideology of Islamic supremacism, and to step up pressure on American Muslim advocacy groups to renounce that ideology definitively and begin extensive programs to teach against it in American Islamic schools and mosques.



In October 2006, a pro-jihad internet site published a “Guide for Individual Jihad,” explaining to jihadists “how to fight alone.” It recommended, among other things, assassination with guns and running people over. Is it possible that Sulejmen Talovic and some of these others were waging this jihad of one? It is indeed, but with law enforcement officials trained only to look for signs of membership in al-Qaeda or other jihad groups, and to discount terrorism as a factor if those signs aren’t there, it is a possibility that investigators will continue to overlook.

 

[LordAzrael]

https://www.wsmv.com/news/11048353/detail.html

Yet another example - from today

Cabbie Runs Down Students
Religious Argument Leaves One Hospitalized

POSTED: 5:01 pm CST February 18, 2007
UPDATED: 7:12 pm CST February 18, 2007
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NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- A local cab driver allegedly tried to run over two customers after a fight over religion became heated.

The incident happened early Sunday morning on the Vanderbilt campus and left one man hospitalized and a cab driver arrested, said police

Two students visiting from Ohio were coming from a bar downtown when they got into an argument with their driver over religion, said police. After they paid the driver he allegedly ran them down in a parking lot.

Ibrihim Ahmned, of United Cab, was arrested and charged with assault, attempted homicide and theft. One of the passengers, Andrew Nelson, managed to outrun the cab but Jeremy Invus was taken to the Vanderbilt University Medical Center with serious injuries, said police.

Ahmed has been convicted of misdemeanors including evading arrest in a motor vehicle and driving on a suspended license, said police.

Ahmed was charged with theft because police said the license plate on his cab was listed as stolen. His bond is set at $300,000.

 

[carbo-fation]

Edited to avoid arguement!

 

[Spartan Rex]

Good find Azrael.
Yup, you gotta dig for some of those pesky-makes others-uncomfortable-facts.
Criminal motivations dont always fit into other folks' PC world view.
Glad the badguy was stopped cold with lethal force, itll save money and grief on a long drawn out trial
where the defense wont deny that the defendent did it but rather why he did it.
The jury will need to understand all the horrible crap he went through in his childhood.
Completely ignoring the fact that thousands have gone through the same circumstances or worse
and some how fight the urge to waltz into a crowded mall and start gunning down innocents.