Columbus Police Chief Kim Jacobs said officials "have to consider that it is that possibility" that a mass stabbing on the Ohio State University campus this morning was a terrorist attack.
The campus was locked down for an active shooter
situation, but authorities said at a press conference that the bullets were
fired by a responding officer. "There's no indication of a firearm being
used by that suspect," Jacobs said.
The attack occurred on 19th Avenue in front of Watts
Hall. Shortly before 10 a.m., a vehicle jumped the curb and ran into a group of
pedestrians on the sidewalk. That initial impact injured
"several," OSU president Michael Drake said.
Then the suspect, who has not been identified by police,
got out and used a butcher knife to cut "multiple" people. Ten were
transported to area hospitals, with one victim in critical condition.
Dispatch first received the call of the
attack at 9:52 a.m., followed by a call at 9:53 a.m. that an OSU
police officer fired at the suspect.
OSU public safety director Monica Moll said officers from
multiple jurisdictions responded to the scene and law
enforcement personnel in the area continue to investigate, but "we
believe the threat was ended when the officer engaged the suspect."
A few buildings remain shut down "as a
precaution," Moll said, as officers "continue to sweep those."
Jacobs stressed that two men photographed in handcuffs
being led away from an OSU parking garage are not suspects, but people who got
caught up in the police search and were "treated as potential
suspects." Police were searching a garage on Lane Avenue after rumors
of a second suspect.
"We have a lot of witnesses to interview," the
chief said, but "we don't have anything to tell us there's a
conspiracy going on."
Drake commended OSU police who "kept something very
unfortunate from being much worse."
"We all live with fear that things like this can
happen to us... we're pleased that this was no more serious than it could have
been," the university president said, adding "we all know we live in
an open society where these kinds of tragedies happen on an all too frequent
basis."
Classes were canceled, Drake said, "to give the
police a chance to begin their investigation."
OSU Police Chief Craig Stone said a butcher knife
was recovered from the scene; he wouldn't say if suspect was a student.
NBC reported,
though, that the attacker was an 18-year-old student originally from Somali and
a legal permanent resident of the United States.
Stone said "it's too early to say" this was a
terrorist attack, but he was able to conclude this "was done on
purpose."
The ram-and-stab attack method has been used recently by
Palestinian terrorists in Israel, including an attack at
the end of October in which a terrorist tried to run over IDF soldiers at a
checkpoint near Ofra and then jumped out with a meat cleaver.
Last month, the Islamic State's Rumiyah magazine advised lone
jihadists to get over any squeamishness about using knives and embrace sharp
objects as "widely available" weapons of jihad.
"It is explicitly advised not to use kitchen knives,
as their basic structure is not designed to handle the kind of vigorous
application used for assassinations and slaughter," the article
stated, further advising "to avoid troublesome knives, those
that can cause harm to the user because of poor manufacturing."
Knife-wielding terrorists were advised to target smaller
crowds or someone walking home from a night out or working the night shift,
"or someone walking alone in a public park or rural forested area, or
someone by himself in an alley close to a night club or another
place of debauchery, or even someone out for a walk in a
quiet neighborhood. One should consider canals, riversides,
and beaches." They further advised jihadists to inflict blunt-force
trauma on victims before stabbing.