A man making “some references to Allah” stabbed and injured eight people in a shopping mall in the US state of Minnesota, before being shot dead by an off-duty officer, police said.
The suspect “asked at least one person if they were Muslim before he assaulted them,” Blair Anderson, the police chief in the city of St Cloud where the attack took place, told journalists. But he emphasised that the assailant’s motivation remained unclear and said “whether that was a terrorist attack or not, I’m not willing to say that right now because we just don’t know.”
The attack came as 29 people were injured in a deliberate explosion in a busy New York neighborhood Saturday. Mayor Bill de Blasio said there was no known link to terror at this stage.