Authorities warn that the Islamist State extremist group may be looking to attack an historic bridge in the American heartland – the Memphis and Arkansas Bridge which spans the Mississippi River.
According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, federal agents have alerted local authorities to the possibility that Islamic State militants may be seeking to would blow up the bridge based on an anonymous tip.
Spokesman Chris Allen for the FBI said the agency had passed the threat on to local police in a bulletin out of an “abundance of caution”.
“This is an unsubstantiated, anonymous threat,” he said, adding that there was no useful intelligence arising from it. The threat to the bridge was first reported by My Fox Memphis, a local news channel.
The station quoted the FBI warning as saying that according to an anonymous tipster, Islamic State had instructed a person in Memphis “to blow up the Memphis-Arkansas bridge on an unknown date, activating ISIS terror cells in the United States”.
In response, police from Memphis have been patrolling the mile-long bridge. Built in 1949, the bridge crosses over the Mississippi river and is considered part of the Mississippi River Trail. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2001.
My Fox Memphis Supervisory Special Agent Joel Siskovic said: “Although we received an anonymous threat, there is no actionable intelligence regarding an attack on the bridge. We take every threat seriously and whenever we receive a threat like this we take steps to inform all of our law enforcement partners.”
