Inside the shabby trailer where New Orleans terrorist Shamsud-Din Jabbar plotted his New Year’s Eve massacre, a copy of the Quran sat open on a reading stand. The final lines on the page tell of the promise of paradise for those who kill and are martyred in the name of Allah.
“They fight in His cause, and slay and are slain; a promise binding,” the passage says.
That promise inspired Jabbar, 42, as he prepared his attack, pledging allegiance to Islamic State. They may have been the last words that the father of three read before setting out for New Orleans with the intent to kill, knowing that he would probably die in the attempt.
Hours later, 14 revellers had been murdered in the heart of New Orleans’ historic French Quarter. Jabbar rammed his truck, bearing an Isis flag, into the crowd in the early hours of New Year’s Day. He was killed moments later in a shootout with police.
• Who was Shamsud-Din Jabbar? New Orleans attacker identified
More than 300 miles away, in a back bedroom of the trailer in a Houston suburb, Jabbar had installed an industrial workbench where he built the pipe bombs that were packed into a cool box in the truck. President Biden said on Thursday that the killer had had a remote detonator in the truck to set off the explosives, also probably assembled in the trailer.
The surface of the bench was smeared with chemical residue left by FBI agents who stormed the house within hours of the attack.
By the time investigators left on Thursday after a search lasting more than 17 hours, Jabbar’s home lay in disarray.
The door stood jammed in the frame, off its hinges, the lock smashed when Swat teams broke in.
Inside, it had been picked apart. Investigators appeared to have cut a hole in the floor, perhaps searching for hidden weapons or explosives. Cupboards and drawers stood open. The cheap furniture had been shoved around.
But much of the property looked just as Jabbar had left it when he departed on his suicide mission, telling neighbours that he was moving to New Orleans to start a new job. There was little indication of the man who police said was “hell-bent on carnage”, carrying out the deadliest Isis attack on US soil in years.
• New Orleans terror victim was stepson of William and Harry’s nanny
Clothes still hung in closets. There were food and condiments in the kitchen cupboards. Children’s toys lay in another bedroom. Laundry sat on top of the washing machine. A plastic dartboard hung in the living room. Shoes and a rucksack sat by the door.
Stunned neighbours in the trailer park on Crescent Peak Drive said that Jabbar was quiet and withdrawn, but saw no “red flag” that he had been radicalised.
“We’re still in shock. He was a nice boy, a good neighbour,” Mumtaz Bashir, a 59-year-old IT worker who lived next door to Jabbar, told The Times.
Bashir last saw Jabbar on Tuesday morning, loading the white truck he would use in the attack when he left for New Orleans. Hours later Jabbar would be dead, leaving a trail of carnage and unanswered questions.
“He was quiet, a very private person,” Bashir said. “There was not a clue that he could do something like this.”
Inside, however, the trailer tracked Jabbar’s journey from clean-cut Army serviceman to ambitious real estate agent and family man to leading a solitary life, cut off from his children and consumed by radical Islam.
• Who are the victims of the New Orleans attack?
Scraps of his past life lay around the house — a label marked “Veterans in the USA” was a reminder of Jabbar’s decade in the US military, including a year in Afghanistan as an IT specialist, where officers described him as “a great soldier”.
A desk in the sitting room with twin computer screens was a relic of Jabbar’s days as a real estate agent and a consultant with Deloitte boasting an income of $120,000. Only the computer’s hard drive was gone, seized by the FBI.
• Happy crowds thronged New Orleans — then the truck struck
How Jabbar became radicalised by Isis remains unclear. As his business foundered and his second divorce sent him spiralling into debt, he moved into the trailer around 18 months ago.
Along another wall, the bookcase hinted at the obsession that gripped Jabbar in his final months. Among a host of books on Islam, the shelves carried other copies of the Quran, and the Sahih al-Bukhari, the collection of the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad. A prayer mat lay close by.
