On Monday morning, Pensacola Mayor Grover Robinson announced that the city, where an aviation student from Saudi Arabia murdered three people at a naval air base last Friday, had been under siege from a cyber attack since 1:45 a.m. on Saturday. As the Pensacola City Journal reported, Robinson said at his weekly press conference that virtually all the computer communication systems in City Hall as well as online payment systems at Pensacola Energy and for city sanitation were shut down.
Robinson said he did not know whether the cyber attack had anything to do the shooting at NAS Pensacola. According to ABC 3, Robinson asserted, “We are at this point going in two different directions. We’re working it from a legal standpoint, trying to work it forensically that way, trying to figure out who this was. And two, where do we go from here in putting our system back together.”
Fox Business quoted Robinson saying, “Our computer people were working through the weekend to see what was happening. We’ve been sort of looking to reevaluate our entire IT system and so we’ll keep doing that.”
The shooter at the naval air base murdered Ensign Joshua Kaleb Watson, 23, of Coffee, Alabama; Airman Mohammed Sameh Haitham, 19, of St. Petersburg, Florida; and Airman Apprentice Cameron Scott Walters, 21, of Richmond Hill, Georgia.
On Friday night, as The Daily Wire reported, multiple reports surfaced stating that six Saudi nationals had been detained for questioning near the Naval Air Station (NAS) in Pensacola, Florida, some of whom allegedly filmed an alleged member of Saudi military who went on shooting spree at the base earlier in the day.
“Six other Saudi nationals were detained for questioning near the scene of the shooting, including three who were seen filming the entire incident, according to a person briefed on the initial stages of the investigation,” The New York Times reported. Fox News reported that, according to a senior U.S. official, “the suspects were taken into custody and are being questioned about the shooting.”
On Sunday, The Daily Wire noted that Reuters and other outlets reported that the shooter posted “anti-American screeds” to his social media ahead of the shooting, and MEMRI, which tracks and documents under-reported information about terrorism and Middle East politics, appeared to have tracked down and located the shooter’s social media profiles.
“The [shooter] appeared to have posted a justification of his planned attack in English on Twitter a few hours before it began, according to SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors online Islamist extremism,” Reuters reported Sunday. “He referred to U.S. wars in Muslim countries, writing that he hated the American people for ‘committing crimes not only against Muslims but also humanity,’ and criticizing Washington’s support for Israel, SITE’s analysis said.”
Counter-terrorism expert Rita Katz noted on Twitter that, “[t]he style of the #Pensacolashooting doesn’t necessarily resemble one group over another. However, given that ISIS has very little to lose at this point, it wouldn’t be surprising if it claimed the attack, regardless of the attacker’s potential allegiances.”