UPDATE: Dahir Adan’s father, Ahmed Adan, says that police identified his son as the slain attacker.
Ahmed Adan told the Star Tribune of Minneapolis that police told him Saturday night that his son, Dahir A. Adan, died at Crossroads Center mall in St. Cloud.
He says police didn’t mention the attack on the mall, but they seized photos and other materials from the family’s apartment.
Authorities haven’t publicly identified the attacker.
Minn. attacker was Dahir Adan, acc ro his dad, who said thru translator he born in Africa, lived in U.S. for 15yrs https://t.co/XV6ZHwL4NT
— Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle) September 18, 2016
The original story begins below:
The Saint Cloud Times is reporting Dahir Adan, a member of the local Somali Community, was the man who attacked nine people at a local mall Saturday while shouting about “Allah.”
A short time earlier, St. Cloud Somali-American community members identified the deceased suspect as Dahir Adan.
Leaders of the Somali-American community in St. Cloud gathered Sunday with his family and issued a statement of sympathy for the family and the nine victims of the attack.
Community leader Abdul Kulane said as far as the family and community know, the suspect did not have any history of violence. He was known as a smart, accomplished student at Apollo High School. He was a junior at St. Cloud State University, Kulane said. Adan was also working part-time as a private security officer, leaders said.
At a press conference on Sunday, St. Cloud, Minnesota city officials refused to release the identity of the man who attacked nine people with a knife in a local mall Saturday night while shouting “Allah.” The attacker was killed by an off-duty police officer from a nearby city who happened to be in the mall at the time.
Mayor Dave Kleis of St. Cloud said that three of the victims were hospitalized, while six had not been hospitalized.
Police Chief William Blair Anderson said that police had executed search warrants at two apartments in St. Cloud and had secured the suspect’s vehicle, which was found in the mall parking lot.
Anderson also said the SCPD had had three “contacts” with the suspect, all of which were minor. At least one was a traffic incident.
Anderson added that he did not know how long the suspect had been living in the St. Cloud community.
The FBI Special-Agent-in-Charge from Minneapolis said the FBI and the Joint-Terrorism Task Force were investigating the attack as a “potential” terrorism incident and was seeking the suspect’s immigration records.
Mayor Kleis said the situation was “fluid.”
On Sunday, ISIS released a statement calling the attacker a “soldier of the Islamic state.”
According to the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migrants interactive reporting website, 1,061 Somali refugees have been resettled in St. Cloud in the six years since 2011, a pace that has accelerated over the past three years.
Sixty-one Somali refugees arrived in the Minnesota city located seventy miles from Minneapolis in FY 2011, and more than 200 per year have arrived in the four fiscal years since 2013.
Only one other refugee from a different country of origin–that one was from Burma, arrived during these six years.
Across the state of Minnesota, 4,995 Somali refugees arrived over this six year period.
As the St. Cloud Times reported in 2015, tensions between the Somali refugees and local residents of St. Cloud have been high:
Ethnic tension inside Technical High School became public spectacle Wednesday on its south lawn as more than 100 students and parents, most of them Somali, protested what they described as a pattern of bullying and discrimination to which school officials have not adequately responded.
The protest started shortly before noon. Protesters, including students and parents, chanted slogans and waved posters.
Inside the school, normal activity ground to a halt as the bulk of students not involved in the protest were contained to their classrooms.
One of the protesters, Tech junior Hafsa Abdi, said students organized the event because administrators haven’t addressed conflicts between Somali and non-Somali students.
Other protesters alleged unfair school disciplinary practices in which Somali students are disciplined more harshly than non-Somalis.
“They are not taking any calls right now,” a person who answered the phone at the St. Cloud Police Department tells Breitbart News about the department’s media representatives.
Breitbart News also sent these questions by e-mail to the St. Cloud Police Department, but has not received a response:
Chief Anderson said at a Sunday press conference the department had three previous contacts with the attacker, so you obviously know his name.
If you are not releasing his name now, when do you plan to release his name?
Was the deceased attacker a resettled refugee?
Was the deceased attacker a resettled refugee from Somalia?
Was the deceased attacker a resettled refugee from Somalia residing in the St. Cloud community?
Can you comment on the statement released by ISIS that the attacker was “a soldier of the Islamic state?”
Local grassroots activists have been critical of the lack of information concerning the suspect’s identity, as well as local media reporting.
“The reporting is so biased; this morning a TV reporter on WCCO in Minneapolis interviewed an eyewitness who got close enough to identify the perpetrator without question. However, the description was edited down to a tall, thin male with a goatee!” a local grassroots activist tells Breitbart News.
“A month ago, Governor Dayton was quick to visit St Cloud to tell critics of refugee resettlement that they should move to another state. Yet, the morning after mass stabbing a by what appears to be a Somali Muslim yelling ‘Allah’, the governor is nowhere to be found,” the activist adds.
Back in 2015, Ann Corcoran of Refugee Resettlement Watch wrote, “Lutheran Social Service of Minnesota is responsible for the Somali chaos in St. Cloud.”
That supposedly ‘Christian’ charitable organization is directly responsible for the high Somali numbers in St. Cloud, and they are jointly responsible for bringing over ten thousand Somalis from around the world to colonize Minnesota towns in the last ten years alone—Catholic Charities and World Relief MN (now Arrive Ministries) helped also.
Corcoran added:
A few years ago Saint Cloud, MN was targeted as a new Somali resettlement site by the US State Department and its contractor there— Lutheran Social Service of Minnesota.
Originally the Somalis there were what the refugee industry calls “secondary migrants” who move in from other areas of the state or from another state—usually because they hear that an enclave of their kind of people is growing, sometimes for jobs, and sometimes for better welfare.
St. Cloud’s Somali population is now growing as Somalis are arriving directly from hot spots around the world. (The direct resettlement by the Lutherans to St. Cloud began in around 2010.)
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