Pensacola killings have the halmarks of a planned terrorist attack

The FBI is still being cautious about the motivation for the fatal shootings at the US Naval Air Station Pensacola base in Florida although agents are becoming convinced it was probably a terrorist attack. All the signs are that it was a planned and premeditated and deliberate attempt to kill as many US Navy personnel as possible. Apart from the three sailors who died, the shooter injured eight others. The gunman, Second Lieutenant Mohammed Alshamrani, a Saudi national, was part of a team of Saudis receiving training at the base. Initial suspicions of a terrorist act were raised when it emerged that the shooter, who was subseqently killed by police, was a Saudi national who appeared to have had an interest in Osama bin Laden. It is not possible, never possible, to forget that 15 of the 19 9/11 terrorist plane hijackers were Saudis and that they learnt how to fly commercial arliners in South Florida. Osama bin Laden was Saudi. And here we have a Saudi Air Force pilot being given specalist training at the famous US military base. Saudi Arabia I am sure will be desperate to delink Lieutenant Alshamrani from terrorism but the fact is that as a guest of the United States he went to a gunshop and bought himself a 9mm Glock 45 pistol in Florida. He had clearly done his homework because as a foreign holder of a hunting licence he was permitted under the law in Florida to buy a gun and ammunition over the counter and walk off down the road without a care in the world. He also smuggled the gun into the base, another act of premeditated malevolence, knowing that he intended to use it, not for a hunting and shooting party, but to commit murder within the base. If, as is being suggested, he had a row with his training instructor who teased him over the shape of his moustache, then surely Alshamrani would have sought him out and shot him if his sole motive was to take revenge on an individual who had humiliated him. But no, he opened fire on 11 of his supposed comrades. One remembers a similar outrage at Fort Hood in Texas on November 5 2009 when Major Nidal Hasan of the US Army opened fire at random and killed 13 soldiers and wounded 32 others. It was a massed shooting which was unquestionably a terrorist act. Mohammed Alshamrani will be remembered for committing another appalling terrorist act in the US.The purchase of the Glock pistol may have been legal in the eyes of the US constitution and Florida law but it was the act of a man with murder on his mind.