25-Oct-14: The hatchet attack on New York cops and its previously unstated Islamic terror background

Seconds after the axe-attack in Jamaica, Queens [Image
Source: NY Daily News]

We wrote yesterday ["24-Oct-14: Attacks on security personnel and what we do and don't know"] about several almost simultaneous attacks on law enforcement officials in the US and Canada that happened this past Wednesday and Thursday. One of them involved a non-verbal axe-wielding man who tried to kill several policemen, a man whom a friend (interviewed on television here) called "a great guy".

Here's an update:

A hatchet attack on New York police officers was a "terrorist act" carried out by a self-radicalized Muslim convert who had been in the military and browsed Al-Qaeda websites, police said Friday.
"This was a terrorist act," police commissioner Bill Bratton told a news conference on Friday, one day after the attack, saying he was "very comfortable" describing it as a "terrorist attack." Police said Zale Thompson, who was 32, unmarried and unemployed, appeared to have acted alone and was not affiliated to a particular group, but that the investigation was ongoing. A loner who spent hours locked away in his bedroom, he had looked at websites about groups such as Al-Qaeda and Islamic State, and watched beheadings and Wednesday's deadly attack in Canada..
In an attack that lasted just seven seconds, Bratton said Thompson charged with a hatchet in his hand, striking two officers before he was shot dead by the two other officers, who were uninjured... A 29-year-old female bystander was accidentally shot and is also in hospital in a critical but stable condition, Bratton said.
Police said Thompson converted to Islam two years ago and that relatives described him as a "recluse" and "lately depressed." An axe and a large hunting knife were recovered from his home and Thompson made anti-Western, anti-government and in some cases anti-white statements on social media, police said. He visited websites that focused on terror groups such as Al-Qaeda, the IS organization and the Shebab Islamists in Somalia. [AFP, October 24, 2014]

The attacker via security camera [Image Source]

And from a different source ["NYPD chief: Hatchet attack was Islamic terror"]:

In recent postings on social media, he ranted about injustices in American society and oppression abroad, but the postings didn’t point to any affiliation with a terror group or direct influence of radical Islam, they said. In one comment posted in response to a YouTube video, however, Thompson wrote that “If the Zionists and the Crusaders had never invaded and colonized the Islamic lands after WW1, then there would be no need for Jihad!”

But evidently there is a need for jihad. And a clear and unsatisfied need for effective measures against the jihadists.