(Belgian) A 19-year-old American, who attacked police officers with a machete on New Year’s Eve in New York, has been charged federally, including with attempted murder of state officers, a federal prosecutor announced Tuesday.
The radicalized young man, Trevor Bickford, who wanted to carry out a jihadist attack that evening, is accused of having attacked three agents on New Year’s Eve near Times Square, where New Yorkers and tourists from all over the world gather by the thousands on the evening of December 31st. According to a police report, Trevor Bickford had delivered several blows and caused injuries to the head and shoulders of the officers, without endangering their lives, before being immobilized. In the statement announcing Trevor Bickford’s indictment, Manhattan federal prosecutor Damian Williams cites his “attempts to wage jihad through the assassination of US state agents.” “We are deeply grateful for the bravery of the officers injured in this horrific attack,” US Attorney General Merrick Garland said in the same statement. During an initial interrogation Trevor Bickford had declared “essentially”: “I wanted to kill a uniformed officer (…) I shouted Allah Akbar”, according to the police report. Originally from the state of Maine, in the northeastern United States, the young man had shown signs of Islamist radicalization before the events and carried a diary with him in which he wrote that his brother, a soldier in the US army, had “joined the ranks of the enemy”, according to the press release from the office of the prosecutor Damian Williams. (Belgian)
