On November 28, 2016, a terrorist vehicle-ramming and stabbing attack occurred at 9:52 a.m. EST at Ohio State Universitys Watts Hall in Columbus, Ohio. The attacker, Somali refugee Abdul Razak Ali Artan, was shot and killed by the first responding OSU police officer, and 13 people were hospitalized for injuries.
Authorities began investigating the possibility of the attack being an act of terrorism. On the next day, law enforcement officials stated that Artan was inspired by terrorist propaganda from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and the late radical Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. Amaq News Agency released a statement claiming the attacker responded to an ISIL call to attack coalition citizens, though there is no evidence of direct contact between the group and Artan.
There had been high concerns from federal law enforcement officials about car ramming and stabbing attacks being encouraged by online extremist propaganda due to the relative ease of committing them compared to bombings. In the weeks prior to the incident, ISIL had been urging its followers to copy a car ramming attack in Nice, France, that killed 86 people.
Earlier that year in February, a man attacked patrons at the Nazareth Restaurant in Columbus, wounding four before being shot and killed by responding police officers. About seven months later, a mass stabbing occurred at the Crossroads Center shopping mall in St. Cloud, Minnesota. During the attack, a Somali refugee stabbed and injured nearly a dozen people before also being fatally shot by police. Both incidents are currently being investigated as possible acts of terrorism. There had also been a number of recently foiled ISIL-inspired terror plots or intents to travel to the Middle East to fight for ISIL, in which the perpetrators all originated from Ohio.
In the week prior to the attack, the perpetrator, Abdul Razak Ali Artan, traveled to Washington, D.C., and purchased a knife at a Home Depot there. The day before the attack, Artan bought a second knife at a Walmart in Columbus. Investigators have not determined whether either knife was used in the attack, but were particularly suspicious of Artan traveling to the U.S. capital, roughly 400 miles (640 km) from Columbus by car, to buy a knife.
According to the chairman of the OSU Department of Materials Science and Engineering headquartered at Watts Hall, students told him that someone called in a fluorine leak in the building, which has lab facilities. As required during emergencies, the students congregated in the courtyard outside the building. At 9:52 a.m., the attacker drove a Honda Civic into the courtyard, deliberately striking several pedestrians, including emeritus professor William Clark, before crashing into a brick wall.
As people rushed in to help the injured, the assailant got out of the car, armed with a butcher knife, "let out a war cry" according to one witness, and began attacking students. One student described a man with a knife, "chasing people around trying to attack them." Another witness recounted that the attacker did not say anything as he stabbed people. At one point, Anderson Payne, a U.S. Army veteran who was helping people struck by the Honda Civic, grabbed the attackers knife and ducked under his arm in order to escape, but was unable to disarm him and had his hand slashed in the process. A student injured during the attack described seeing people screaming and fleeing before she encountered the assailant, who said "Im going to kill you" and then slashed her left arm. The attacker was shot and killed by police within two minutes of the attack starting.
Initial reports had stated that there was an active shooter incident. At 9:54 a.m. EST, OSU sent out an emergency notification asking students to shelter in place. At 10:19 a.m. EST, police reported that the attacker had been killed by an officer after failing to comply with the officers orders to put down his weapon. An academic adviser who witnessed the attack described seeing the assailant charge at police, who fired and shot him multiple times.
The scene was declared secure and the shelter in place order was lifted on the OSU campus at around 11:30 a.m. EST. However, subsequent Twitter posts indicated the order may have been lifted prematurely and that at least one building was still on lockdown at 12:23 p.m. EST. The fluorine leak at Watts Hall was determined by authorities to have been unrelated to the attack.
A total of thirteen people were injured in the attack. Eleven of them were injured directly by the attacker; most of them were struck by his vehicle, at least two suffered stab wounds, and one victim had a fractured skull. A twelfth person was shot in the foot by a stray bullet fired by Officer Horujko, while a thirteenth person was treated for unspecified injuries. The victims included nine students, one faculty member, and one university worker, while the remaining two had as-of-yet unknown backgrounds. All of their identities were released by November 30.
Eleven of the injured were treated at area hospitals. Eight of them were sent to OSU Wexner Medical Center, Grant Medical Center, and Riverside Methodist Hospital. None of the injuries were considered life-threatening. Four remained hospitalized by the next day.
The first officer to respond to the scene of the attack was Alan Horujko, an officer with the OSU Division of Police who happened to be nearby because of a reported gas leak. Horujko shot and killed the assailant within a minute after the attack started. The Columbus Division of Police, Franklin County Sheriffs Office and the Ohio State Highway Patrol dispatched tactical teams, negotiators, a K-9 unit, and additional officers to assist campus police. In addition, a Columbus Division of Fire bomb squad was dispatched to the scene and arrived at 10:06 a.m. The FBIs Cincinnati office announced that its agents were assisting campus police in the investigation. Agents from the local Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) unit were also dispatched to the scene of the attack.
Upper Arlington and Grandview schools were locked down for a short time while police investigated the incident. The Ohio Department of Transportation temporarily closed ramp access to and from Route 315 at Lane Avenue and Medical Center Drive.
Abdul Razak Ali Artan (1998 – November 28, 2016) was a Muslim Somali refugee and legal permanent resident of the United States who had been a logistics management major in the Max M. Fisher College of Business at the time of the attack. Though OSU said Artan was 18, investigators said some records conflicted and investigators believed he may have been older.
Artan was the third-eldest of seven children. He alleged that he was born in a refugee camp after his family fled Somalia. However, a senior U.S. government official said that Artan left Somalia with the rest of his family in 2007, and that they spent seven years in a refugee camp in Pakistan, settling in Islamabad on a road known as "Somali Street". He moved to the U.S. on a refugee visa with his mother and six siblings in 2014.
The Franklin County Coroners Office, conducting a preliminary autopsy report on Artans body, determined that he died from gunshot wounds to the head and chest.
Artan and his family first settled in a temporary shelter in Dallas, Texas, for approximately 24 days before relocating to Columbus. They lived together in four units of an apartment at the Havenwood Townhomes complex in the West Side. He was described by neighbors as a consistently polite man who always "attended daily prayer services at a mosque" in Columbus. Friends in Ohio and Pakistan described him as a "studious, devout young man who loved America" and "did not have any extremist tendencies." He and his family did not appear to be familiar figures at local mosques and in Somali community groups, according to leaders there. According to a police report, before settling into Havenwood Townhomes, Artan and his family contacted police in 2014 after an animal heart was left on the hood of a relatives car.
Artan previously attended Columbus State Community College from the fall of 2014 to the summer of 2016, and graduated cum laude with an Associate of Arts degree, after which he transferred to OSU. He had no disciplinary record at Columbus State, and was described as "very normal" and talking about Islam frequently by his classmates there. At the time of the attack, he was enrolled in fourteen-and-a-half credit hours for the semester. Artan had worked at a Home Depot in Columbus for less than a year.
In August, on his first day at OSU, Artan was interviewed by The Lantern, the school newspaper. In the interview, he said that he was having trouble finding a place to pray in comparison to his old school at Columbus State, which provided private prayer rooms. However, he was apparently unaware of a prayer space provided in the OSU student union. Artan added that he was scared about other peoples opinions of him because of what he perceived to be negative portrayal of Muslims in the media, and criticized the then Presidential candidate Donald Trump for not being "educated on Islam". In the interview, Artan expressed fear about Donald Trump’s rhetoric toward Muslims, and what it might mean for immigrants and refugees.
The FBIs Joint Terrorism Task Force and the ATF became involved in the investigation. The investigation is ongoing; police have not ruled out terrorism as a motive as of November 28.
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