Attacker With Hatchet Called Self-Radicalized

New York: The hatchet-wielding man who attacked several police officers in Queens was described by police officials on Friday as a "self-radicalized" Muslim convert who was inspired by terrorist groups like the Islamic State and al-Qaida, but who most likely acted alone and on his own initiative.

The man, identified by law enforcement officials as Zale H. Thompson, 32, set upon four New York City police officers as they posed for a photograph on Jamaica Avenue just after 2 p.m. Thursday, striking one in the arm and another in the head, before he was shot and killed by the other officers. A stray bullet also struck a bystander in the back.

The episode underscored the challenges to identifying isolated threats and preventing attacks. Thompson had never drawn the attention of law enforcement, the police commissioner, William J. Bratton, said, despite evidence that he had become radicalized in recent years.

After speaking with Thompson's relatives, authorities determined that he had converted to Islam two years ago. His online history shows that he had recently visited websites related to the Islamic State, al-Qaida and Al Shabab, the military Islamist group based in Somalia, and viewed videos of beheadings, said John Miller, who oversees intelligence and counterterrorism for the Police Department.

"It appears, just from the electronic forensic piece of this, that this is something he has been thinking about for some time and thinking about with more intensity in recent days," Miller said.

On Friday, detectives and counterterrorism investigators with the New York Police Department, along with the FBI, interviewed Thompson's family and friends and scoured his computers, cellphones and bank records, officials said.

What emerged was a portrait of a man officials described as an out-of-work recluse, who spent hours in his room on the computer browsing radical websites and occasionally left comments on Facebook and YouTube that disparaged whites and Christians and most recently supported violent jihad.

Bratton said that he considered the attack on the officers a "terrorist act" but said there was as yet no evidence linking Thompson to any organized group, international or domestic.

"We at this time believe that he acted alone," Bratton said at a news conference, which was also attended by Mayor Bill de Blasio. "We would describe him as self-radicalized. It would appear at this time that he was self-directed in his activities."

Even so, the assault, which occurred in the same week as two similar attacks on military personnel in different parts of Canada, put police officers throughout the city on heightened alert.

On Thursday evening,  the New York Police Department issued a memo to "all commands" warning officers on patrol to remain vigilant.

"Due to recent attacks against law enforcement and military personnel, both here in N.Y.C. and in Ottawa, Canada, police officers on patrol should maintain a heightened level of awareness," the memo said.

The attack Thursday lasted all of seven seconds. A law enforcement official who gave an account, based in part on surveillance video of Thompson in the seconds before the attack, said it was clear that the assault had not been random.

"He targeted the police officers," the official said. "He stakes them out, on video we have, he watches them for a minute or two from the corner," the official said, adding, "he bends over and it looks like he takes the hatchet out of a backpack and charges right at the officers."

After being shot by the police officers, Thompson fell to the pavement and was found by investigators still clutching the hatchet, officials said.

One of the officers injured in the attack, Joseph Meeker, 24, was released from the hospital Friday, Bratton said. His colleague, Kenneth Healey, 25, remained in serious but stable condition at Jamaica Hospital Medical Center with a severe wound to the back of his head.

"He is recovering, but in a great deal of pain," Bratton said.

The injured bystander, identified only as a 29-year-old woman, was in critical but stable condition at the same hospital, he said.

In comments on Facebook and YouTube, retrieved by SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors extremist activity, Thompson described white Christians as "aggressive and violent" and reproached the "Christianized Negro" for following the faith "his slave master gave him."

On a YouTube video in support of an Islamic caliphate, a commenter named Zale Thompson made remarks seemingly sympathetic to violent jihad.

"If the Zionists and the Crusaders had never invaded and colonized the Islamic lands after WW1, then there would be no need for jihad!" the commenter wrote. "Which is better, to sit around and do nothing, or to jihad."

Thompson, for at least the past decade, appears to have been adrift. He was involuntarily discharged from the Navy in 2003 after only two years in a construction unit in Port Hueneme, California, possibly because of drug use, said Chief Robert K. Boyce, who is leading the investigation.

Although Thompson had no criminal record in New York, he had six arrests in Oxnard, California, said Boyce, including one for leaving the scene of an accident, for which he pleaded guilty in 2003.

At some point, he moved back to New York, first into the apartment in Brooklyn, where he had grown up and then, after he was evicted in January, back and forth between the homes of his mother and father in Queens.

Thompson's former landlord, Sam French, said he had become despondent when served with eviction papers in January and spoke of killing the new manager.

"I had to calm him down and say 'No, no,'" French said.