(AFP) – President Joe Biden, accompanied by his wife Jill, on Monday visited Bourbon Street to honor the victims of a New Year’s truck-ramming attack that killed 14 people in New Orleans. The presidential couple stopped to pay their respects at a makeshift memorial near the popular tourist party area in the Big Easy, where suspect Shamsud-Din Jabbar drove his pick-up truck through a dense crowd.
After the first lady laid flowers at the site, the pair bowed their heads for a moment of silence. The president, a lifelong Catholic, made the sign of the cross before departing the site. The first couple met with survivors, relatives of the dead, and law enforcement impacted by the attack, before heading into the city’s St. Louis Cathedral for an interfaith memorial service.
Biden has requested “additional federal resources to help the city of New Orleans prepare for upcoming major events,” White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre said Monday aboard Air Force One en route to New Orleans. Those events include Mardi Gras, the city’s weeks-long carnival ending on March 4, and the NFL’s Super Bowl championship on February 9.
The New Year’s Day attack remains under investigation by the FBI, which declared it an “act of terrorism.” Jabbar, a US army veteran who died in a police shootout after the attack, had expressed his support for the Islamic State jihadist group on social media. An IS flag was attached to a pole on the back of the vehicle used in the deadly assault.
© 2024 AFP
