(AFP) – US authorities were probing Thursday for any possible link between a vehicle explosion outside a Trump hotel in Las Vegas and the deadly New Orleans truck-ramming on America’s violent first day of 2025. The Tesla Cybertruck explosion killed the person inside the vehicle and injured seven others, and came just hours after an electric pickup truck plowed into a crowd in New Orleans’ French Quarter, killing at least 15 and injuring dozens.
US President Joe Biden and other officials said investigators had not established any link between the two events, although they continued to probe. Investigators were focusing in the Las Vegas explosion on a man believed to have rented the Cybertruck, identified by US media as Matthew Livelsberger. Livelsberger was in the US Army special forces and “on approved leave at the time of his death,” an Army spokesperson said in a statement. The New Orleans attack suspect, Shamsud Din Jabbar, had also served in the army, officials have said.
The FBI and local law enforcement said they believed the Tesla blast was an isolated incident, but they were investigating whether it was an act of terrorism. The electric vehicle pulled up to the Trump International Hotel’s glass entrance before a large explosion, Las Vegas Sheriff Kevin McMahill told reporters. Video footage shows the stainless steel truck parked at the hotel entrance, then bursting into flames, followed by smaller explosions that appeared similar to fireworks.
The building, which opened in 2008, is part-owned by President-elect Donald Trump’s family business. McMahill told a later news conference that the back of the truck contained gasoline and camping fuel canisters, as well as large firework mortars. McMahill also said the fact that it was a Cybertruck “really limited the damage… because it had most of the blast go up through the truck and out,” noting that the glass doors of the hotel, just a few feet away, “were not even broken by that blast.”
Biden said authorities were probing any possible connection with the attack in New Orleans. “Thus far, there’s nothing to report on that score,” he said. FBI agent Jeremy Schwartz described the Las Vegas blast as “an isolated incident.” He said that an FBI joint terrorism task force was conducting the investigation with two main goals — to confirm the identity of the person who died in the Tesla truck and whether the blast was an act of terrorism.
– Concerns over Trump-Musk link –
There had been indications that the suspect in the New Orleans attack had been inspired by the Islamic State group, Biden said. McMahill said they had no indication so far that the blast in Las Vegas had any similar links to the jihadist group. However, he added: “It’s a Tesla truck, and we know Elon Musk is working with President-elect Trump, and it’s the Trump tower. So there’s obviously things to be concerned about there and that’s something we continue to look at,” McMahill said.
Musk, who backed Trump in the November election and was named by the Republican to head up a commission to trim government spending, said in a post on his social media platform X that the explosion was “unrelated to the vehicle itself.” He said earlier the “whole Tesla senior team” was investigating the blast, adding: “We’ve never seen anything like this.” The truck had been rented in Colorado through the carsharing company Turo, police said — the same app that was used to rent the vehicle in the New Orleans attack. McMahill said that was a “coincidence… that we have to continue to look in to.”
– Wade Vandervort
© 2024 AFP
