Ohio State student is ID’d as attacker; motive still unclear
A 20-year-old Ohio State University student was identified as the suspect behind the gruesome attack Monday on the school’s campus.
The alleged attacker, Abdul Razak Ali Artan, was killed by police after driving a car into a group of people and then attacking victims with a butcher knife, said Monica Moll, public safety director at Ohio State. FBI agents had joined local police in investigating the incident. Eleven people were injured; all were expected to survive.
Artan was born in Somalia and living in the United States as a legal permanent resident. Investigators discovered a message he posted on a Facebook page before the attack in which he expressed anger about the treatment of Muslims around the world, according to reports from multiple news outlets, citing unidentified law enforcement officials.
Artan was enrolled at Columbus State Community College from the autumn semester of 2014 through the summer semester of 2016, according to college spokesman Allen Kraus.
Artan graduated with an associate of arts degree in the spring of 2016 and then took a non-credit class for summer 2016. He had no record of behavioral or disciplinary issues during his time at Columbus State and graduated with honors, Kraus added.
Ohio State Police Chief Craig Stone said that Artan was alone during the attack and that police were still trying to deter- mine a motive. Ohio State officials said the quick action of officer Alan Horujko, who fatally shot Artan, prevented more people from being injured in the incident.
Columbus Police Chief Kim Jacobs, whose officers also responded to the attack, said terrorism had not been ruled out. “That’s why our federal partners are here and helping,” she said.
The attack comes as the terror group the Islamic State, also known as ISIL or ISIS, through its online recruiters has called on U.S.-based sympathizers to carry out attacks on American soil if they cannot find a way to join the fight in Syria and Iraq.
In May, FBI Director James Comey said ISIL was having a harder time recruiting U.S. sympathizers to travel to Syria, but the agency was seeing more incidents in which potential suspects were being recruited to plot strikes in the U.S.
Omar Hassan, president of the Columbusbased Somali Community Association of Ohio, said that a member of Artan’s family told him the suspect’s mother and siblings had been interviewed by law enforcement authorities after the incident.
Columbus has the secondbiggest Somali population in the U.S. with about 50,000 immigrants.
Hassan said the incident would reverberate in the Somali diaspora in the U.S. “The timing is not good,” Hassan said. “We are black. We are Muslim. We are Somali. We are all the negative stigmas.”