The man who stabbed eight people at a mall in St Cloud, Minnesota, was a "soldier of the Islamic State", the group claimed on Sunday through an affiliated agency. Chief of St Cloud Police William Blair Anderson said they still did not have "anything substantive" to support the claim, and that all they knew currently was that "this was a lone attacker", CNN reported. "Right now, we're trying to get to the bottom of his motivations," he said.

Islamic group-linked Amaq agency posted the update online, sticking to the pattern of the terror outfit claiming responsibility for incidents that initially appear to be individual attacks, like the incident in Nice, France. According to the United States' Federal Bureau of Investigation, the attack was "a potential act of terrorism."

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Local reports identified the knife-wielding attacker as being of Somalian descent, but authorities have no confirmed his ethnicity. The man was wearing a private security uniform when he entered Crossroads Mall in St Cloud and stabbed eight people before being shot dead by an off-duty police officer. According to witnesses, the assaulter made a reference to Allah and asked at least one person whether they were Muslim before he began the attack, police said in a statement.

Three of the eight people stabbed are still in hospital, with one of them facing life-threatening wounds. The stabbings took place in a number of locations inside the mall in St Cloud, located around 105 km northwest of Minneapolis. There was security present inside, but they were not armed.