FBI and Las Vegas police investigate suspected case of terrorism | Las Vegas
A 23-year-old man drove from New York to a suburb of Las Vegas and shot himself in the head after driving his rented Nissan Sentra through a gate and crashing into a pile of heavy wire spools at an electrical substation, local police said Friday, calling the incident a suspected act of terrorism.
Las Vegas Sheriff Kevin McMahill said the suspect, Dawson Noah Maloney, died from a self-inflicted shotgun wound. press conference on friday. He was wearing soft body armor when police found him.
“There is no ongoing threat at this time,” he added.
Police first heard about the incident in Boulder City when it was reported as a suicide.
Police found two shotguns, an AR-style pistol, several magazines loaded with .223 ammunition, a box of shotgun shells, two flamethrowers, a crowbar, an axe, and a cell phone in the car.
Police found explosive-making materials such as thermite, ammonium nitrate, magnesium strip, metal pipes and gasoline in Maloney’s hotel room. They also recovered several books “related to extreme ideologies, including left-wing and right-wing extremism, environmental extremism, white supremacy, and anti-government ideology,” McMahill said.
“Given the location and materials discovered, this incident was treated as a terrorism-related incident,” McMahill said.
McMahill said the Albany police department obtained a missing person’s report for Maloney. But he also said Maloney had contacted family members just before the incident, “made many statements about self-harm” and said he was going to do something that would “put him in the news”. McMahill said he wrote a message to his mother describing himself as a “dead terrorist son”.
The FBI is also investigating the incident. A search of two homes in the Albany area turned up gun parts and a 3-D printer, according to Christopher Delzotto, the FBI’s special agent in charge of Las Vegas.
The incident was reported in the local press for the first time McMahill mentioned this in passing during his “state of the region” speech early Friday.
“Just last night our counterterrorism teams were out there still working on an incident that occurred in our valley,” McMahill said. “It appears to be a credible counterterrorism threat.”
McMahill referenced the incident while discussing efforts to bolster his department’s counterterrorism unit.
McMahill said Las Vegas has faced many terrorist threats in recent years. But, he added, at the Department of Homeland Security, “we’re seeing a deterioration in what we’ve relied on for a long time” as the agency becomes “more focused on immigration-type issues.”
He also added that Las Vegas has historically relied heavily on the New York police department’s intelligence gathering and dissemination activities through programs such as “Operation Shield” and “Operation Sentinel” for its counterterrorism efforts. “We all feel that [Las Vegas] “As a metro, we continue to be a target and we need to do something different about it.”
