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October 22, 2014

The Hill: Schiff: Ottawa shooting 'consistent' with terror

Martin Matishak of The Hill reports on the shooting in Ottawa:

A senior member of the House Intelligence Committee said Wednesday the shooting in Ottawa is “consistent” with calls from Islamic militants for “lone-wolf” attacks against the U.S. and its allies.

“We don't know yet ... whether this was a terrorist-inspired attack. But if it was, it's certainly consistent with what [the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS] has been urging,” Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) said in an interview with CNN.

Schiff predicted that if terrorism was the motivation behind the attack it “will only further raise alarm bells in Canada and here at home.”

He added that officials have been concerned about "the potential of these home-grown attacks, using very low-tech means, not hard to get weapons either here or in Canada, and to utilize them, you know, to damaging consequence as we see.”

Just days earlier another Canadian soldier was run over and killed by a man authorities suggest was a jihadist. The suspect, who was fatally shot by police, had been previously detained when he sought to fly to Turkey, where many pro-ISIS fighters have crossed the border into Syria.

Schiff said the two incidents might be “completely unrelated.”

However, “the subsequent attack may have been inspired by the earlier attack, or they may have decided to literally pull the trigger on today's attack because of concerns about increased security after the attack a couple of days ago.”

He said that “if you had to diagram out what are the most approximate threats to the country, you would probably put the lone-wolf attacks, low-tech, lone-wolf attacks right in the bull's-eye.”

He credited the FBI for taking the “prudent “ step of raising alerts among its offices.

“Intelligence is really our best defense against something like this, but even intel, obviously, isn't perfect,” Schiff said.

To read the full article, please click here.


By:  Martin Matishak
Source: The Hill