An Ohio school was placed on lockdown Wednesday after a man with a "heavy accent" phoned the school and threatened to murder children with an AK-47 due to the current conflict between Israel and Hamas, according to local police.
All schools in Pickerington, Ohio, were placed on lockdown after an unknown man made a threatening call to the Pickerington North High School, Fairfield County Sheriff Dave Phalen confirmed to the Washington Free Beacon.
The man, who claimed to have an AK-47, said he planned to launch an attack on the school and kill students over his apparent anger at the Middle East conflict, Phalen said.
"The school received a call [at around 11:15 a.m.] from a male with a heavy accent and he indicated that he was going to attack Pickerington North due to attacks on Israel and was going to kill the kids and that he had an AK-47 gun," Phalen recounted.
"He identified himself as ‘Mohammed Shehad,’" or something similar to that, and claimed to live in the area, Phalen said, explaining that those who fielded the call were unsure precisely what last name the man provided.
"My sense is that due to the way he identified himself it sounds like he was upset at Israel," though the individual’s exact motivations remain unclear, Phalen said. At this point, authorities "really don’t know what his frame of mind was or what he was thinking."
All area schools were placed on "exterior lockdown" as a precautionary measure, the Columbus Dispatch reported.
School will resume on Thursday and an officer will be assigned to Pickerington North. Additional deputies will also be in the area, Phalen said.
Fairfield County detectives also are beginning to investigate the matter to determine the individual’s identity.
"We have detectives assigned to that; they’re working on trying to trace the phone number and identify the suspect," Phalen said.
Patrick Poole, a terrorism analyst who lives in the area, said he believed the threat was made by a person upset with Israel’s military action in the Gaza Strip.
"We have had a growing problem here in the Columbus area for years that local law enforcement and the media want to continue to sweep under the carpet," Poole said. "Not only has Central Ohio been the home of the largest known al-Qaeda cell since 9/11—with several members currently in prison on terrorism charges and at least two deported—we've had a number of cases of homegrown jihadists come through town, including al-Shabaab rapper Omar al-Hammami and Little Rock Army recruiting station killer Carlos Bledsoe."
"An al-Shabaab recruiter and fundraiser from the area was killed in a firefight in Mogadishu in 2010, and we know of several cases of young men who have left from Columbus to join the Somali terrorist group," Poole said. "One of the original online jihadist forum operators, Sarfaraz Jamal, grew up in the area and initially ran his operation from his Worthington home."
Additionally, "we just had a pro-Hamas rally at the statehouse a week and a half ago, a regular feature here in central Ohio whenever there is conflict in that part of the world," Poole noted. "In fact, two of our local Hamas activists are currently in prison in Egypt. Now that the threat is targeting area school children, hopefully it will begin to wake people up to the scope of the problem."
Eric Pennington, a Violet, Ohio resident whose daughter attends the school, said he could not at first believe that the threat was related to the Israel conflict.
"My daughter texted me late morning saying they were in lockdown," Pennington said. "She got home and started saying this guy may be Arabic and was threatening to shoot us because he was mad at Israel and what was happening in Gaza. I’ll confess, I thought, that can’t be right."
After reading local news reports confirming that the threat was related to the Israel conflict, Pennington recalled being shocked.
"I’m thinking to myself this can’t just be a guy out of the blue, [who is saying] I’m not happy, so I’m going to call and make a threat," Pennington said.