As Twitchy reported last week, police took their time in identifying the man suspected of entering an Israeli-owned deli in Columbus, Ohio, and attacking patrons with a machete, injuring four. Hours after the name of the suspect was in circulation on Twitter, police confirmed that the suspect was Mohamed Barry, 30, of the Republic of Guinea, West Africa.
https://twitter.com/CynthiaSpeaks/status/698459984456216576
Yesterday, the Tower published an interview with Hany Baransi, owner of the Nazareth Restaurant & Deli, who recounted the attack on his deli, which certainly doesn’t support the initial claim by police that the attack was “spontaneous” and random.
The assailant, identified by police as 30-year-old Mohamed Barry, “came in and asked where I was from,” Baransi told The Tower. While Baransi was at home nursing a headache at the time, one of his employees– a young waitress– told Barry that the owner is from Israel. The man left after he determined that Baransi wasn’t at the restaurant, only to return around 30 minutes later with a machete and start hacking people.
“He came to each table and just started hitting them,” Karen Bass, who was in the restaurant at the time, told WBNS. “There were tables and chairs overturned, there was a man on the floor bleeding, there was blood on the floor.”
According to authorities, Nazareth’s employees and patrons fought back and threw chairs at Barry, who fled the eatery after injuring four diners. He led cops on a five-mile chase before his vehicle spun off the road and, armed with his machete and another knife, he lunged at the officers.
“He yelled ‘Allahu Akbar’ and then he attacked them with the machete and that’s when they shot him and killed him,” Baransi said.
Owner Of Columbus Ohio Machete Attack Restaurant Vows To Hang Bigger Israeli Flag https://t.co/5QWzO9JE39 pic.twitter.com/EXUEkFHzE3
— INQUISITR (@theinquisitr) February 15, 2016
Baransi, an Israeli Christian Arab, believes an Israeli flag visible from the street was responsible for catching the attention of Barry, and he plans to replace it — with a bigger flag.
I am going to get a bigger flag,
and a Star of David necklace
and a tattoo
They don’t scare me.
We are Israelis.https://t.co/Z8fFwuDXUy— Marc Leibowitz (@Marc_Leibowitz) February 15, 2016
A tattoo? “Honest to God, I am not kidding,” Baransi told The Tower. “They don’t scare me. We are Israelis. We are Israelis. We are resilient, we fight back.”
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Correction: A previous version of this post described Mohamed Barry as a Somali national; he was later identified as being from Guinea. Twitchy regrets the error.
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