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NYE machete attack suspect was reportedly on FBI’s radar after mom alerted local police

January 4, 2023 | | Print Article

Multiple sources have confirmed that federal authorities were well aware of the all-American teen turned Times Square jihadist responsible for attacking New York Police Department officers with a machete on New Year’s Eve.

Exactly three weeks before the attack, 19-year-old suspect Trevor Bickford’s mother reported his “terrorist leanings” to their local police in southern Maine.

“A while back, the family called and said he was acting strange or he wanted to leave, and there was some talk about the Taliban and all that kind of stuff,” Wells Police Captain Gerald Congdon explained to the Daily Mail.

He added that his department immediately passed the case on to the FBI, who in turn apparently did nothing about it except put him on a watch list in December — as usual.

Three days later, Bickford committed the attack, injuring three officers:

In a statement to the New York Post, the FBI declined to comment on the allegation that it’d done nothing, saying only that the attack is part of “a very active investigation.”

Critics say the investigation should have been “very active” from the minute the feds heard from Congdon’s department.

According to the Post’s sources, Bickford suffers from depression, had been off his meds for over a year, and had started reading the Quran daily about a month ago.

“He began to read the Quran daily as he became obsessed with Islam, and talked of traveling to Burma or China to commit Jihad, the sources said. The teen had also toyed with the idea of joining Taliban militants in Afghanistan,” the Post notes.

That said, his conversion reportedly occurred sometime after his father died.

“Neighbors and sources said Bickford ‘found religion’ in the years after his father, Tom, died from an overdose in 2018 and became increasingly immersed in Islam. Bickford allegedly told authorities that he’d converted three to four months ago, and more recently became radicalized after reading Muslim texts at a local bookstore,” according to the Post.

So how radicalized was this guy? So much so that sometime before the attack, he wrote a manifesto/diary entry to his family warning them to repent to Allah, the Islamic God.

“I fear greatly you will not repent to Allah and therefore I hold hope in my heart that a piece of you believes so that you may be taken out of the hellfire,” he wrote, according to The New York Times.

“Mr. Bickford also referred in his diary to his brother, who is in the U.S. military, as having assumed the uniform of the enemy,” the Times notes.

The Times notes that at some point in time this year, Bickford grew so “angered by the persecution of Muslims overseas” that he “decided to go abroad and fight for them.”

In response, his family told the authorities again, but this time he changed his plans and decided “to travel domestically, and in peace” instead.

“He left Maine in early December with several thousand dollars in cash, a debit or credit card, and the machete. By last Thursday, he had arrived by train in New York,” according to the Times.

Once in New York City, he “spent Friday night at a hotel in the Bowery in Manhattan,” “stopped by the Bowery Mission and made a large donation in accordance with Muslim tenets of charity,” and then hopped a subway to Queens.

“By midafternoon on New Year’s Eve, Mr. Bickford was in Times Square. Because he wanted to attack only the police, not bystanders, he waited until he found officers who were not standing near other civilians,” the Times notes.

Following the attack, during which Bickford sustained an injury himself, he was hospitalized and remained so as of late Tuesday, according to the Portland Press Herald.

“Police are recommending the suspect, Trevor Bickford, be charged with two counts of attempted murder of a police officer and two counts of attempted assault in the attack, the New York Police Department said,” according to CNN.

“The Manhattan District Attorney’s office has said that they do not yet have details of when Bickford will be arraigned. It’s unclear whether he has an attorney,” CNN reported.

Vivek Saxena
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