Fuaed Abdo Ahmed, 20, was identified as the man who took three hostages inside a Tensas State Bank in St. Joseph in Lousiana.
Ahmed was shot and killed by state officers while one of the hostages died and another is in critical condition. The third hostage, Patricia White, was released shortly before the shootings.
During negotiations with law enforcement late Tuesday, Ahmed said he was going to kill the hostages, Louisiana State Police superintendent Col. Mike Edmonson said. State police then entered the building just before midnight Tuesday.
That’s when Ahmed shot the two hostages and then state police shot and killed him, Edmonson said. The hostages were shot in the upper body.
The hostages were both shot with a handgun, but Edmonson said Ahmed was also armed with a rifle.
Ahmed had a list of demands he communicated to negotiators, including that they help him remove a device from inside his head, Edmonson told WBRZ.
Edmonson said Ahmed was a paranoid schizophrenic who had planned the attack.
“He was mad at people that he said were mean to him,” Edmonson said. “He had voices in his head.”
Ahmed’s desire was to inflict pain and “to ultimately kill people,” he said, referring to items that Ahmed had in a duffel bag that he was going to use to torture the hostage with.
Investigators found a book about hostage negotiating and other things at Ahmed’s apartment that gave them insight into what he was planning, along with information shared on his Facebook page.
Ahmed was born in America and had family members in St. Joseph who owned a convenience store near the bank.
Ahmed’s relatively new Facebook page (he joined on May 21) describes him as a student at the University of Louisiana at Monroe and a resident of St. Joseph. It says he worked at the LSU Student Government and was from Fresno, Calif.
The man listed as his brother, Amen Ahmed, is listed on his own Facebook page as being from Lake Providence, La. He isn’t in any pictures with Fuaed. He took a visit to Aden in Yemen in August 2010.
Fuaed Abdo Ahmed’s posts veer from the philosophical to the mainstream, with quotes from the Tao Te Ching and a YouTube video explaining that if one wants to live forever one should be a jellyfish. He also posted an Eminem song and a cartoon.
The cartoon, shared on August 11, isn’t a typical one.
In three slots, it shows a hostage situation. In the first, a masked gunman has a pistol pointed at his hostage’s neck. “I'll release the hostage if you give me a sandwich!” Says the gunman.
Two police officers in the next slot discuss the proposal. “How close is the nearest deli?” asks one. “Three blocks,” says another.
“Okay, you can kill the hostage,” says the first cop through a loudspeaker.
Ahmed’s last post, made around noon on August 13, was another quote, beneath a picture of a man with a sword jumping at a tank.
The quote is from Robert A. Heinlein, from his 1940 science fiction novel If This Goes On:
“When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, ‘This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know,’ the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything--you can’t conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report
