Two gunmen, including a man once suspected of seeking to join Islamist militants in Somalia, waited only seconds to open fire on police blocking their way to a cartoon exhibit and contest depicting the prophet Muhammad, authorities said Monday during a widening probe into a suburban shootout near Dallas that left both attackers dead and raised possible links to a homegrown terror plot.
The motive for the late Sunday attack was not immediately clear, but one of the event’s keynote speakers — Dutch parliament member Geert Wilders — has been denounced by Islamist militant groups such as al-Qaeda for his outspoken criticism of the Muslim presence in Europe.
The event’s organizer, too, has been criticized for its anti-Muslim rhetoric by rights groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The firepower of the suspected attackers — assault weapons and some type of body armor — also suggested that the Dallas suburb of Garland could be the latest point of violence linked to tensions between Western-style open expression and drawings considered highly provocative by many Muslims.
“Obviously they were there to shoot people,” Garland police spokesman Joe Harn told reporters. But he stopped short of describing the shooting as a terrorist attack. He said, however, that investigators have not ruled out possible terrorist connections.
Nearly 900 miles to the west, meanwhile, investigators searched the Phoenix apartment of the suspects. A U.S. law enforcement official told The Washington Post that the attackers have been identified as Elton Simpson, 30 — who had previously been the target of a terror-linked probe — and his roommate, Nadir Soofi, as officials tried to piece together the planning behind the late Sunday attack that wounded one guard.
Some Twitter posts, including several claiming affiliation with the Islamic State, had appeared in recent days decrying the cartoon event organized by group widely viewed as anti-Muslim. But investigators had made no public connections between the social media traffic and Sunday’s attack.
