TOM LEONARD: Did the New Orleans truck terrorist turn to IS during a trip to Egypt last summer?

In a YouTube video he posted in 2020 to advertise his services as an estate agent, Shamsud-Din Jabbar boasted of how his time in the US Army had taught him ‘the meaning of great service and what it means to be responsive and take everything seriously, dotting i’s and crossing t’s to make sure that things go off without a hitch’.

His faith in his military efficiency appears unbearably grim now that he has killed at least 14 people in an early morning car rampage through a crowd in New Orleans – an outrage President Biden said was ‘inspired’ by the Islamic State (IS).

The driver’s armed forces training certainly seemed in evidence as he deftly drove around police barricades protecting packed Bourbon Street in the historic French Quarter on New Year’s Eve, tore down the street and mounted the pavement before emerging from his vehicle brandishing an assault rifle.

He opened fire on police officers who shot back, killing him.

He’d been flying a black and white IS flag from his rented Ford pickup truck, having allegedly pledged himself to the terror group. 

He had intended to cause further bloodshed by leaving two bombs inside cooler boxes in nearby streets.

In a U-turn on its initial suspicion that Jabbar was not acting alone in New Orleans – the FBI said yesterday it now believes the 42-year-old US-born American was. 

However, investigators continued to search yesterday for accomplices or associates and attention inevitably fell on another US veteran who died just hours later in another deadly vehicle incident that may also yet prove to have been terror-related.

The driver who plowed into pedestrians celebrating the New Year in New Orleans killing at least 10 people and injuring dozens is dead following a shootout with police

A suspected bomber who blew up a Tesla Cybertruck, with himself inside it by the front entrance of the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas, was identified as Matthew Livelsberger. 

The vehicle, packed with gas tanks, camping fuel and fireworks, also injured seven others, although experts say the rugged stainless steel chassis of the Cybertruck contained much of the blast. 

Livelsberger’s body was found to have a bullet to the head he inflicted before the blast.

Intriguingly, he and Jabbar both once served at the same base – Fort Bragg, albeit at different times – and both hired the vehicles used in their attacks from the same online car rental and sharing company.

The FBI said yesterday it had found no ‘definitive link’ between the New Orleans and Las Vegas incidents although it stressed its investigations were still ‘very early’. 

Jabbar had also worked in tech – first in the army and later in civilian life. 

On paper, Jabbar hardly seemed like the most obvious recruit to IS, a savagely murderous jihadist group that tends to attract disgruntled ex-criminals and other social misfits with a grudge against the world.

After the army – where he had been a human resources and IT specialist – he’d had jobs at the

Matthew Livelsberger, 37, was identified as the bomber in the attack that left seven wounded. He is pictured in Afghanistan in a profile by a local newspaper in the Ohio town where he grew up 

The Tesla cybertruck exploded about 15 seconds after the driver pulled up in front of Donald Trump’s Las Vegas hotel

The Tesla Cybertruck is seen after it exploded outside the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas

IT conglomerate Accenture, UK accounting company Ernst & Young and at another British corporate giant, the accounting giant Deloitte which he’d joined in 2021 as a £100,000-a-year ‘senior solutions specialist’. 

However, his life had started to come off the rails in recent years as he’d faced an acrimonious divorce and financial problems. 

In a despondent email to his wife’s lawyer in 2022, he discussed racking up tens of thousands of dollars in credit card and other debts while trying to save a floundering estate agent business he’d set up. 

‘Time is of the essence. I cannot afford the house payment,’ he said. ‘It is past due in excess of $27,000 and in danger of foreclosure if we delay settling the divorce.’

After converting to Islam years earlier, he had recently shown renewed interest in religion and become fiercely devout. 

On his internal profile page at Deloitte he said he was interested in hunting and prayer, and quoted an English translation of what – with hindsight – might seem an alarming passage from the Koran. 

It read: ‘Indeed, the righteous will drink from a cup whose mixture is of Kafur, A spring of which the servants of Allah will drink. They will make it gush forth in force. They fulfil vows and fear a Day whose evil will be widespread.’

He was far more explicit in a series of now-deleted Facebook videos he filmed while he was driving – possibly, police believe, from his home in Houston, Texas, to New Orleans – in which he claimed he was inspired by dreams to join IS and pledged to kill in their name.

Jabbar (pictured) had also worked in tech – first in the army and later in civilian life 

Jabbar working as the information technology team chief for the 82nd Airborne Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team during Leaders Training Program rotation on November 16, 2013, at Fort Polk, Louisiana

Superintendent of Police for the New Orleans Police Department Anne Kirkpatrick makes a statement after a vehicle drove into a crowd on New Orleans’ Canal and Bourbon Street

He said he’d originally intended to murder his family after luring them to him by throwing a ‘celebration’ party but realised that wouldn’t reflect the ‘war between the believers and disbelievers’.

While friends and neighbours described Jabbar as mild-mannered and polite, if socially withdrawn, Dwayne Marsh, who is married to Jabbar’s first wife, said he had started acting erratically in recent months, ‘being all crazy, cutting his hair’. 

He said he and his wife stopped allowing the two daughters she shared with Jabbar, now aged 15 and 20, to spend time with him. Jabbar had reportedly described the daughters as a ‘mess’. 

Jabbar’s brother, Abdur, 24, told The New York Times they last spoke two weeks ago and his brother hadn’t mentioned plans to go to New Orleans, let alone embark on a killing spree.

He claimed his brother, while brought up Christian, had been Muslim for ‘most of his life’ and that he’d joined the military because he wanted to ‘get some sort of discipline’.

Chris Pousson, a retired Air Force veteran who went to school with Jabbar – known as ‘Sham’ in those days – remembered him as ‘quiet, reserved and really smart’.

After Jabbar left the army in 2015, they reconnected online where Mr Pousson said his old friend was posting endlessly about Islam. 

‘It was never Muslim extremist stuff and he was never threatening any violence, but you could see that he had got really passionate,’ he said.

Officials confirmed Jabbar had attached an ISIS flag to the truck (pictured) he used to plow through the crowd

Emergency services attend the scene on Bourbon Street after a vehicle drove into a crowd on New Orleans’ Canal 

But Jabbar also had an interest in guns, once posting online: ‘It’s a shoot-the-guns type of Saturday morning.’ It appears he tried to sell a pistol, shotgun and ammunition on a gun trading website in November and December. He’d also had brushes with the criminal justice system. 

Jabbar, who grew up in Beaumont, a city east of Houston, was sentenced to nine months probation after admitting a 2002 charge of petty theft. 

In 2005, he was arrested for driving with a suspended licence. He was given six months probation after pleading no contest.

He married Nakedra Ball and they had two daughters. He then joined the US Navy but left after two months only to join the

army two years later in 2006, serving at bases in North Carolina, Louisiana and Alaska.

His military career was solid if unspectacular. In early 2009, he was deployed to Afghanistan where he served for 11 months. Ironically, given what has transpired, he was awarded the Global War On Terrorism medal, which was created to recognise service members who served in Iraq and Afghanistan after the 9/11 terror attacks. 

Jabbar never served in combat but was promoted in 2013 to the rank of staff sergeant.

He was twice disciplined for driving under the influence, leaving the service in 2015. He then joined the army reserves where he served about five years before being honourably discharged.

Police cordon off the area around the site of the overnight attack in the French Quarter of New Orleans, Louisiana, on January 1 

Louisiana state police personnel stand near the site where people were killed in the terror attack during New Year’s celebrations, in New Orleans

Jabbar won a place at Georgia State University in 2015 where he studied computer information systems while working in computing at Accenture. That same year, he gave an interview making clear that he’d struggled to adapt to civilian life.

From 2018 to 2021, he worked –again in IT – as a cloud computing manager at Ernst & Young while trying to get his own estate agency business off the ground. 

He joined Deloitte at a ‘senior consultant’ level on an annual £100,000 salary. His clients there included the state of Oregon, pharmaceuticals giant Johnson & Johnson and the federal National Institutes of Health.

Deloitte said in a statement: ‘We are shocked to learn of reports today that the individual identified as a suspect had any association with our firm… like everyone, we are outraged by this shameful and senseless act of violence and are doing all we can to assist authorities in their investigation.’

But as his career progressed his domestic life fell apart.

He separated from his wife in 2012 and she won custody of their two children, while he was ordered to pay child support. Jabbar married second wife Shaneen in 2017 and had a child with her, only to file for divorce three years later, claiming their union was ‘insupportable due to discord or conflict of personalities’.

And just days later, Shaneen was granted a restraining order, forbidding him from sending threatening or obscene messages to her or causing ‘bodily injury’ to her or their child. 

The order specifically stated that neither of them could make late-night prank calls, cancel each other’s credit cards or abuse each other in other ways.

Although they later dropped their divorce petition, he applied for one again in 2021 and the marriage was dissolved the following year. In a court statement, Jabbar claimed he was bankrupt.

The marital home was passed to Shaneen and Jabbar moved into a mobile home surrounded by goats and sheep in a run-down trailer park in a Muslim area of Houston. He reportedly visited Egypt for 10 days in the summer of 2023.

Other Westerners who became IS recruits have been radicalised on trips to the Middle East.

Perhaps what happened on that visit to Egypt may help explain why a man who’d prospered in the US in so many ways should choose to turn so violently against the country of his birth.