ISIS defiant: Las Vegas gunman dubbed ‘Abu Abdul Bar al-Amriki’ – By Leo Hohmann (wnd.com) / Oct 2 2017
The shooter in Sunday night’s mass slaughter of 59 concert goers in Las Vegas, identified as 64-year-old Stephen Craig Paddock, a man with no criminal history, is now being investigated for possible ties to Islamic terrorists.
At least 527 people were injured in what was described by Sheriff Joseph Lombardo as a well-coordinated attack.
ISIS claimed credit in an Arabic-language website, but authorities immediately tried to debunk the claim, saying they had no evidence to support it.
“We will investigate that down to the end,” but thus far nothing has been found to connect Paddock to international terrorism, Lombardo said at one of four news conferences held Monday on the shooting.
“We have determined, to this point, no connection to an international terrorist group,” said an unidentified spokesman for the FBI in a brief statement at a news conference at 11:40 a.m. Monday in Las Vegas.
The questions stemmed from a Twitter posting by the group Site Intel Group that ISIS spokesman Amaq has claimed Paddock was one of its “soldiers” who converted to Islam months ago.
The statement, in Arabic, read, “Attacker of the #Las_Vegas shooting is a soldier of the Islamic State and carried out the operation in response to targeting coalition countries,” Jihadoscope, a cybermonitoring company that monitors jihadi activity, confirmed in a translation sent to Newsweek.
Michael S. Smith II, co-founder of terror analysis company Kronos Advisory, who regularly tracks ISIS activity, also confirmed to Newsweek the claim of responsibility and the claim about Paddock’s conversion.
After media continued to discredit the ISIS claims, the terrorist organization doubled down by sending out an official communique identifying Paddock as “Abu Abdul Bar al-Amriki.”
This is the first U.S. attack that ISIS has claimed responsibility for in 2017.
Steven Stalinsky, executive director of Middle East Media Research Institute, noted the language posted on the group’s Amaq news agency site matched the language of previous claims that turned out to be true.
Stalinsky says when an attack is carried out by someone with no formal connection to ISIS, the individual is typically referred to as a “soldier” who has often pledged allegiance in an email or online to the terrorist group.
“I am reserving judgment,” Stalinsky told the Washington Examiner. “But in the past when they claim an attacker is a soldier, somehow there has generally been a connection.”
Paddock reportedly had no military background, leading to questions about where he learned how to modify the AR-15s he used into a fully automatic weapons. He could have purchased them illegally from someone else who modified the guns. But given that he built his own platforms from which to shoot down into the crowd, it’s not out of the question that he converted the gun himself.
The shooting took place at the Route 91 Harvest Festival about 10:08 p.m. Sunday. Country music star Jason Aldean was on stage with approximately 22,000 people in attendance when the bullets started raining down on the crowd, sparking a mass stampede out of the kill zone that caused dozens more to be injured.
The shooting began as the last act was performing on the last day of the event. The attack on the Ariana Grande concert in the U.K. earlier this year also took place at the end of the event.
Police seized 19 additional guns, ammonia nitrate and Tannerite from Paddock’s Mesquite, Nevada, home, the sheriff’s office reported at a 6 p.m. press conference. They also found thousands of rounds of ammo. Tannerite is a brand name for a patented exploding target used in firearms practice, while ammonia nitrate could have been part of a bomb-making operation.
The modified AR-15s used in the attack reportedly fired .223 and .308 caliber rounds capable of piercing police armor.
http://www.wnd.com/2017/10/islamic-connection-to-vegas-shooting-quickly-rejected-by-fbi/?cat_orig=us
PB/TK – At this point, ISIS will claim responsibility for anything to get their name in the news. Hurricane Irma – ISIS did it.. Morning gridlock causing you to be late for work – ISIS did it
