Man with ‘extremist leanings’ behind attack on NY police
THE man who attacked New York City police officers with a hatchet before being shot dead was reported to have Islamic “extremist leanings,” a monitoring group said.
The man, identified in the US media as Zale Thompson, had posted an array of statements on YouTube and Facebook that “display a hyper-racial focus in both religious and historical contexts, and ultimately hint at his extremist leanings,” the SITE monitoring group said.
Four rookie police officers in the Queens borough were posing for a photograph at the request of a freelance photographer when the man walked up and without saying a word attacked them with the hatchet, a city hall statement said.
One officer was hit in the arm and another in the head before the other officers shot and killed the attacker, according to police commissioner Bill Bratton. A 29-year-old bystander was accidentally hit by a bullet in the lower back and taken to a hospital, while the man who took the photograph was cooperating with police and was not considered a suspect, Bratton said.
SITE said that in a comment Thompson had posted to a pro-Islamic State video on September 13, 2014, he described “jihad as a justifiable response to the oppression of the ‘Zionists and the Crusaders.’”
But Bratton said that police were investigating and that it was too early to determine whether it was terror-related.
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