The FBI appears to have requested travel records on Shamsud-Din Jabbar the day before he killed 14 people in New Orleans, according to two House Republicans, despite the bureau previously telling lawmakers the ISIS-inspired maniac was not on a terror watchlist.
Reps. Mark Green and August Pfluger revealed in a Tuesday letter that the House Homeland Security Committee recently learned about the FBI’s possible effort to monitor Jabbar’s travel starting on Dec. 31 — hours before he mowed down dozens of New Year’s revelers on Bourbon Street.
“It is unclear to the Committee at this time whether the creation of the travel record was a technical error in the system or was set as a one-year tracking period starting from the night before the terrorist attack to December 31, 2025,” the lawmakers wrote to FBI Director Christopher Wray and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
An FBI spokesperson told The Post in response: “The FBI was not aware of Jabbar prior to the New Year’s Day attack and did not issue any advance warnings about him. The FBI will continue to keep Congress and the public informed as the investigation progresses.”
Jabbar — who proclaimed his allegiance to ISIS in chilling Facebook posts early on Jan. 1 and displayed a caliphate flag on the truck that he drove into the crowd of bystanders — visited the Big Easy before the attack: once on October 30 for at least two days, and a second time on Nov. 10.
On Sunday, the FBI released footage that Jabbar wore Meta smart glasses during one of those scouting trips.
The 42-year-old Houston resident had also traveled to Egypt for a week and a half starting on June 22, 2023, and separately, to Ontario, Canada, in July of that year, according to the FBI.
The last visit was just three years after Jabbar had left the Army, where he served for more than a decade as an active-duty IT specialist, stationed briefly in Afghanistan, before working as a reservist and retiring at the rank of staff sergeant.
“The Committee recognizes that law enforcement officials commonly create tracking records for suspects, whether alive or deceased, including travel monitoring records,” noted Green, who chairs the Homeland panel, and Pfluger, who chairs the panel’s subcommittee on counterterrorism, law enforcement, and intelligence.
“These records are often used after an attack to confirm the suspect’s identity or uncover possible associates, particularly when a deceased suspect’s identity is not yet fully verified or when there is a possibility of additional individuals being involved.”
An FBI spokesperson previously told The Post that the bureau “did not receive any tips or other information about Jabbar prior to the attack in New Orleans.”
House and Senate lawmakers were also briefed by the FBI assistant director in the counterterrorism division, David Scott, on Jan. 2 of the terror suspect’s absence from federal watchlists and other monitoring systems.
The Republican lawmakers in their letter demanded all federal records about Jabbar’s travel in the FBI or Department of Homeland Security’s possession to assist in their investigation of the deadly New Year’s attack.
They also asked for information about the “explosive compounds” that the jihadist wired to a remote transmitter — and may have “never used before in the United States or Europe.”
The explosives, found both in coolers in the vehicle and hidden around the French Quarter, were never detonated because police shot and killed Jabbar before he pulled the trigger on the transmitter.
The GOPers further asked for potential “intelligence reports from a foreign government” about Jabbar that may have been shared with the US as well as “what the FBI has learned from the exploitation of the three cell phones recovered” from an Airbnb on Mandeville Street in New Orleans linked to him.
