US officials claim that man renting explosive Tesla Cybertruck outside of Trump hotel in Las Vegas is active-duty Green Beret.

 Four US officials state that the man linked to the Wednesday explosion of the Tesla Cybertruck outside of a Trump Hotel in Las Vegas is a US Special Forces soldier assigned to the 10th Special Forces Group.                                            

IMG Credit: CNN

The officials told CNN the man, who has not been publicly identified, is a US Army special forces operations sergeant with a senior enlisted rank—that of master sergeant. Three officials said he was on active duty but on leave from Germany, where he had been serving with the 10th Group, at the time of the incident.
On New Year's Day, a device under control by the driver detonated a mix of fireworks, gas tanks and camping fuel in the bed of the Cybertruck, killing the driver and injuring seven others nearby, police said.
Police said that the explosion might have been much worse without the body construction of the vehicle, which helped contain the blast.
The FBI is looking at whether the explosion has anything to do with terrorism; officials noted the significance of the Tesla car and the namesake of the hotel.
Kevin McMahill, Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department sheriff, said Wednesday that "it's a Tesla truck and we know Elon Musk is working with President-elect Trump; it's the Trump tower." "So, we keep looking at since there is clearly things to be worried about there."
"Law enforcement activity" by the FBI in Denver, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and the Colorado Springs Police Department is being conducted at a Colorado Springs residence pertaining to the explosion, the FBI stated.
Both the explosion and the vehicle attack in New Orleans earlier Wednesday included a symbolic target on New Year's Day, a truck leased through the website Turo, and a suspect with military experience. This allowed for some general parallels. Authorities said they are looking at possible connections between the two attacks, but they consistently refer to the Vegas explosion as an isolated event.
Thursday FBI deputy assistant director Christopher Raia said: "At this point, there is no definitive link between the attack here in New Orleans and the one in Las Vegas."
The course of events in the incident
rented in Colorado, the Cybertruck showed up in Las Vegas at 7:30 a.m. Wednesday, McMahill reported.
According to officials, the truck arrived at the Trump Hotel and exploded about an hour later following driving up and down Las Vegas Boulevard.
About one hour before the explosion, the driver was seen passing the Trump Hotel on surveillance footage. A law enforcement official involved in the inquiry claims the driver is then seen circling back and stopping in front of the hotel just moments before the car blast.
The police showed a CCTV footage that caught the truck exploding at that moment. In related social media footage, the car is doused with water but surrounded in smoke.
Police revealed footage showing charred gasoline containers and firework mortars discovered among the debris of the extensively burned truck during a news conference.
Police are grateful to Elon Musk.
Since most of the blast was directed upward, McMahill said the body construction of the Cybertruck greatly reduced damage in the hotel valet area. The front glass of the building remained unbroken during the explosion.
" Since this was a Cybertruck had most of the blast, it really limited the damage inside the valet. Up through the truck and out, he said. "You'll see that the blast directly in front of the Trump hotel did not even break the front glass doors."
"I have to thank Elon Musk specifically," McMahill said, noting that the CEO of Tesla Motors sent authorities "quite a bit of additional information," including directly sending video from its charging stations to assist with their efforts to track the driver.
Musk said in a post on X that the explosion was caused by extremely big fireworks and/or a bomb carried in the bed of the rented Cybertruck and is unrelated to the vehicle itself.

"All vehicle telemetry was positive at the time of the explosion," Musk said, referring to the automaker's system that gathers and reports data about a vehicle's performance and status in real time and can track mileage and distance travelled among other capabilities.
In Trump's orbit during the shift to a second White House term, Musk has become increasingly important. Along with former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, the tech billionaire has chosen to supervise a new Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, targeted at reducing government expenditure.
The car was hired on Turo.
The explosion closely matched a lethal attack in New Orleans, where early Wednesday morning a driver slammed a pickup truck into a gathering commemorating New Year's on Bourbon Street, killing fourteen people. Local and federal authorities claimed the driver possessed an ISIS flag in the truck he drove and possible improvised explosive devices.
Operating an online platform for car owners to lease their vehicles, Turo said that its service was utilized to rent vehicles connected to the sad events in New Orleans and Las Vegas and is currently working with the authorities.
"We do not believe that either renter engaged in the Las Vegas and New Orleans attacks had a criminal background that would have identified them as a security threat," a Turo spokesman told CNN.
Authorities are actively looking at the matter; McMahill pointed out that it is just a "coincidence" that the truck involved in the New Orleans attack was also rented from Turo.
"We are totally looking at any connectivity to what happened in New Orleans as well as other attacks that have been happening around the world," McMahill said.