COLUMBUS, Ohio -- A young man deliberately rammed
students with a car on the campus of Ohio State University and then
jumped out to stab them on Monday morning, setting off a campus-wide
lockdown and a mass active shooter alert, officials said. The man was
quickly shot dead by a campus officer nearby.
Ohio officials said it appears this is possibly an act of terrorism, and the FBI and ATF have been sent in to help investigate.
A
federal law enforcement official tells CBS News that the man shot and
killed in the incident at Ohio State University has been identified as
Abdul Razak Ali Artan, a Somali refugee who was a legal permanent
resident and student at the university.
Officials have not said when or
where he entered the United States.
At around 9:52 a.m., a male suspect drove his vehicle over
the curb near the Watts building, which holds the chemical engineering
department, officials said.
What we know about Ohio State attack suspect
The fire department was already on the scene, responding to a
report of a chemical leak which turned out to be a bad filter. The
building had been evacuated.
Students were returning to class when the
incident occurred. Officials have said initial indications are that the
fire alarm and timing of the attack were coincidental.
After
ramming students returning to the building, the suspect got out of the
vehicle and began stabbing people with what officials described as a
butcher knife.
Ohio State University officials said Officer Alan
Horujk was already on the scene, and he responded to the incident
quickly, shooting the suspect dead before he could harm more people.
Eleven people were wounded during the incident, with one
person in critical condition.
All of the injured appear to have either
stabbing or blunt trauma wounds, said Andrew Thomas, the chief medical
officer at Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center.
Ohio State University student describes active shooter situation
At least one witness to the scene told CBS Columbus affiliate WBNS-TV
said a fire alarm was pulled inside the Watts Lab, and when people
exited, a car was waiting for them and appeared to purposefully run them
over.
Another student witness told CBS News she saw a grey car drive by the engineering building at a high speed, hit a cop, then proceed to hit other people.
“This place is huge and I don’t even know where to play,”
Artan said.
“I wanted to pray in the open, but I was kind of scared with
everything going on in the media. I’m a Muslim, it’s not what the media
portrays me to be. If people look at me, a Muslim praying, I don’t know
what they’re going to think, what’s going to happen.”
Officials
said he came to the U.S. with six family members in 2014 after fleeing
Somalia and spending seven years in a refugee camp in Pakistan, CBS News
has learned. Artan attended community college in Columbus before
transferring to OSU this year.
Angshuman Kapil, a graduate student, was outside the building when the car barreled onto the sidewalk.
“It just hit everybody who was in front,” he said. “After that everybody was shouting, ‘Run! Run! Run!’”
Student Martin Schneider said he heard the car’s engine revving.
“I
thought it was an accident initially until I saw the guy come out with a
knife,” Schneider said, adding that the man didn’t say anything when he
got out.
Most of the injured were hurt by the car, and at least two were stabbed, officials said. One had a fractured skull.
Police
surround a car that crashed outside the Watts Building on the campus of
Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, on the morning of Nov. 28,
2016.
Bill Landis/Cleveland.com
Asked
at a news conference whether authorities were considering the
possibility it was a terrorist act, Columbus Police Chief Kim Jacobs
said: “I think we have to consider that it is.”
Surveillance
photos showed Artan in the car by himself just before the attack, but
investigators were looking into whether anyone else was involved, the
campus police chief said.
CBS News correspondent Jeff Pegues
reports many of the signs from this incident point towards this being
precisely the kind of terrorism federal law enforcement officials have
been warning about for some time now.
Last week, a Brooklyn man was arrested for being an ISIS supporter, and was accused of plotting something similar to the attack in Nice, France for Times Square by seeking to drive a truck into a crowd.
Last year, a federal grand jury charged a Columbus, Ohio man, Abdirahman Sheik Mohamud,
with attempting to provide and providing material support to
terrorists, attempting to provide and providing material support to a
designated foreign terrorist organization and making false statements to
the FBI.
With nearly 60,000 students at its main Columbus campus,
Ohio State is the state’s largest employer and one of the nation’s
largest universities.
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