Authorities have confirmed that the man who rammed a car into a crowd of students and stabbed nine people at Ohio State University on Monday is a 20-year-old student named Abdul Razak Ali Artan, who stayed in Pakistan before entering the US as a refugee.
The incident appeared to be a lone wolf attack and the police are trying to ascertain the motive behind the attack. "We can prove to you that the suspect was by himself in the vehicle and committed this act by himself today ...It's an ongoing investigation to determine motive and if anybody else was involved in this act," Ohio State Police Chief Craig Stone told the USA Today.
Artan was shot dead by police after the gruesome attack on the university campus, which has been termed a possible terror attack by the authorities. The attacker tore through a group of people in his car and then attacked them with a butcher's knife. While eleven people were injured in the attack all of them are expected to survive.
Minutes before the attack Artan posted an inflammatory Facebook post that all but gave away the motive behind the attack. "I can't take it anymore. America! Stop interfering with other countries, especially the Muslim Ummah. We are not weak. We are not weak, remember that," the post read.
However, the investigators still reviewed the case as a 'possible' terror attack. The FBI started a probe, local police said. WND website reported that the suspect's mother and siblings were questioned by police after the attack.
Early probe reveled that Artan is a Somalia-born legal permanent resident in the United States. Evidence shows that he was radicalised by jihadist ideology. In Facebook posts and the college journals he had shared anger and frustrating over the world treating Muslims foul.
Artan and his family left Somalia for Pakistan in 2007 before they were able to obtain a United States green card in 2014.
Artan was enrolled at Columbus State Community College from the fall semester of 2014 and he had graduated with an Associate of Arts degree in the spring of 2016, the USA Today reported.
He wrote in the campus newspaper, the Lantern, that the university campus did not give facilities for Islamic prayers. "I wanted to pray in the open, but I was kind of scared with everything going on in the media," he stated. "I'm a Muslim, it's not what the media portrays me to be," WND reported.
Columbus hosts the second largest community of Somali refugees in the USA, which allowed around 130,000 Somalis to settle in the country since 2007. Almost all Somalis in the US are Sunni Muslims.
