Minnesota Mall Attack
Nine Hurt in Minnesota Mall Attack, Suspect Killed.

SAN FRANCISCO (Diya TV) — The man who stabbed nine people at a Minnesota mall Saturday before being shot dead by an off-duty police officer was a “soldier of the Islamic state,” according to an ISIS-linked news agency.

The statement, which was posted online Sunday by the Amaq agency, follows a pattern of ISIS-related media claiming responsibility for what appear to be the acts of individuals across Europe in the past few months.

“We still don’t have anything substantive that would suggest anything more than what we know already, which is this was a lone attacker,” St. Cloud Police Chief William Blair Anderson said Sunday. “And right now, we’re trying to get to the bottom of his motivations.”

Police and witnesses said the man, wearing a private security company uniform, entered Crossroads Mall on Saturday night around 8 p.m. CT, made a reference to Allah and asked at least one person if they were Muslim before he attacked. Ashley Bayne, an employee of JCPenney at the mall, was visiting a coworker at the time of the incident.

“All of sudden chaos just broke out,” she said. “There was a bunch of people running into the JCPenney mall entrance, and they were just screaming that someone was going around the mall stabbing people, and that there was blood everywhere. It was just honestly a really scary experience.”

The stabbings occurred in multiple locations inside the mall, including the common area and in several stores. The mall has security teams on site but they are not armed.

While the identity of the attacker has not yet been made public, police said he had a past relationship with authorities. Most of the encounters were for minor traffic violations. None resulted in an arrest.

The FBI is calling the attack “a potential act of terrorism.”