The car-and-knife attack at Ohio State University by a Somali immigrant Monday has all the indications of terrorism and illustrates the problem of radicalization within the Somali refugee community in the United States, New York Rep. Pete King said.
"There's been a real problem with the [American] Somali community as far as having a large number of Al-Shabaab supporters," King, a member of the Homeland Security Committee told Fox News' Megyn Kelly Monday night.
The OSU attacker, Abdul Razak Ali Artan, 20, injured 11 people when he plowed his car into a crowd of pedestrians and then leapt out and began stabbing people with a butcher knife before being shot to death by a policeman.
King said Columbus, Ohio, where the attack took place, along with Minneapolis-St. Paul, are "the two areas with the highest concentration of Somali [refugees]. We've had up to 40 Somali-Americans who have gone over to Somalia to fight as ISIS terrorists.
"So this is a real threat, it's a real danger. And again, it's a community where the overwhelming majority are good people, but there's a hard core within it," King said.
"When I had my hearings on Islamist terrorism five-and-a-half years ago, the first witness we had focused on the threat we have from Somali-Americans."
King stressed that there must be "more surveillance" in Muslim-American communities in order to help prevent more terrorism.
CNSNews.com reported that since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, some 100,000 Somalis, virtually all of them Muslims, have been admitted into the United States, including more than 9,000 in fiscal year 2016.
The Islamic State terrorist group, which has encouraged its followers to use vehicles and knives when it carries out operations, has claimed responsibility for the attack.
U.S. officials said Artan may have followed the same path to self-radicalization as terrorists in several other "lone wolf" attacks.
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