‘The country is terrified’: Boston security analyst echoes FBI, says NOLA attack was terrorism

BOSTON — Boston 25 Security Analyst Dan Linskey agrees with the FBI that the deadly New Year’s Day attack in New Orleans was terrorism.

“The city, the community, the country is terrified based on this event last night. Now the motivation for this event, we’re unsure,” said Linskey.

Linskey said Wednesday morning, a review has to be done on exactly what happened with security protective measures. He added, “The challenge is the good guys have to be right every day all day and the bad guy only has to get lucky one time.”

Linskey is a former Boston Police Superintendent-in-Chief with experience investigating the Boston Marathon bombing.

He said today in New Orleans a unified command has been established to look into the crime and suspect, execute search warrants to any place the suspect had access, and protect the scene while gathering evidence.

“There’s reports of IEDs. We’ve got to mitigate those. See if those are legitimate IEDs or if like in our marathon, if people were being cautious and presenting things that looked suspicious, which is exactly what we want people to do,” said Linskey.

Police in New Orleans and across the country will be looking toward big events they’re hosting today and making sure security measures are effective and efficient Linskey said.

He also reminded that this New Year’s Day mass casualty event will have an emotional toll on officers for years to come.

“They have to work with those folks to get them through the initial 12-hour operational period or take them off line if need be and then to deal with the long-term effects and make sure we’ve got programs to deal with potential PTSD that can come with this.” Linskey continued, “A lot of them are going to carry images and memories and will get tension in their life when they’re in crowds or they hear noises, or they smell certain smells.”

Linskey said people should try to go about daily activities because otherwise terrorists win.

“Let me be clear. A motivated individual who wants to take life is going to take life. And there’s only so much we can do to cut down. At some point, there’s an unprotected area. You can’t barrier off every street at every location so at some point there’s going to be a crowd in a cue line but was there an opportunity to do anything differently here.”

This is a developing story. Check back for updates as more information becomes available.

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