The ax-wielding maniac who critically injured a cop before being shot dead by another police officer in Brooklyn is the kind of unstable person the Islamic State (ISIS) counts on to wreak havoc in the U.S., says Nicholas Casale, former director of counterterrorism for New York City's Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
"ISIS, unlike al-Qaida who had cells within the United States … [are] trying to get those people who are so radicalized, those people that are on the fringe, they're trying to motivate them to become martyrs and warriors for the cause," Casale said Friday on the "Steve Malzberg Show" on
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"There's no way to stop an attack on a police officer patrolling the streets and that's what they're going to count on. If this, in fact, is true then we have to be very cautious because it could become epidemic."
Terrorism experts say the assault on the four rookie officers by Zale Thompson, 32, of Queens, is not an isolated incident, but a jihadist "lone wolf" attack.
Thompson — a self-radicalized Navy veteran whose Facebook page is filled with racist and jihadist rants — hid behind a bus shelter and suddenly charged the police, swinging an 18-inch steel ax.
He fractured the skull of one officer and smashed the arm of another, before their colleagues could draw their weapons, shooting and killing him.
Casale, founder of the boutique private investigation firm Casale Associates, said the New York doctor who recently returned from Ebola-plagued West Africa and was out and about before being diagnosed with the virus should have been automatically quarantined.
"It’s a little reckless [on the part of] people who are coming back from treating people with Ebola that upon arrival to the United States," he said.
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