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Security posts known as bollards were not in place before a suspect drove a truck into a crowd in New Orleans’ French Quarter early on New Year’s Day, killing 14 people and injuring at least 35.
Louisiana officials have said street barriers were malfunctioning and were being renovated before the city hosts the NFL Super Bowl on Feb. 9.
Short, sturdy posts, made of concrete, metal or other materials, are intended to prevent cars from entering pedestrian areas.
Christopher Raia, deputy assistant director of the FBI, on Thursday called the attack an act of terrorism.
During the early morning hours of New Year’s Day, a police vehicle was parked at an intersection to block access to Bourbon Street in the French Quarter, where the attack occurred, but the suspect walked around the car and onto the sidewalk. , the police said.
Police have named Shamsud-Din Jabbar, a 42-year-old Texas resident and US Army veteran, as a suspect. He died in the attack.
New Orleans Police Chief Anne Kirkpatrick said Wednesday that police were “aware of the bollard situation” and took steps to “reinforce those target areas.”
“Indeed we had a plan, but the terrorist defeated it,” he said.
Kirkpatrick said the city planned to take a number of measures to increase security at the Sugar Bowl football game, which was moved from Wednesday to Thursday afternoon because of the attack.
Bourbon Street will reopen Thursday, shortly before the game.
“We have reinforced the area,” Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry said Thursday.
New Orleans began placing bollards on Bourbon Street more than 10 years ago, Mayor LaToya Cantrell said Wednesday.
But, he added, the bollards began to malfunction due to clogs from Mardi Gras beads, prompting officials to try to replace them before the Super Bowl, which is scheduled to be held at the Caesars Superdome, near the site of the event. stroke.
At the news conference, Kirkpatrick defended the other safety measures the city had in place.
“We had a car there, we had barriers there, we had officers there and they still moved,” he said.
Several cities in the United States and around the world have installed bollards to prevent attacks.
New York City implemented safety measures along the Hudson River Park bike path after a man drove a rented van into cyclists and joggers along the trail, killing eight people, in 2017.
It’s too difficult to say with certainty whether the New Orleans bollards would have prevented such an incident, said University of Michigan professor and counterterrorism expert Javed Ali.
“I had a Ford 150 pickup truck. You shoot that thing at 50, 60 miles an hour, and who knows, even with the bollards in place, the car would have just, through physics, gone through them anyway?” said.
“There must have been a lot of luck,” Ali added. “Unfortunately, that’s what happens in these types of attacks.”
A 2017 report commissioned by the city of New Orleans found that the French Quarter was a “risk and target area for terrorism that the FBI has identified as a concern that the city should address.”
The report noted that the neighborhood “was often densely populated with pedestrians and represents an area where a mass casualty incident could occur.”