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On 20 December 2015 a female driver (later identified as a 24-year-old Oregon woman named Lakeisha Holloway) reportedly struck multiple pedestrians with her vehicle on the Las Vegas strip. One individual, 32-year-old Jessica Valenzuela, died in the accident: On 21 December 2015, the notoriously unreliable web site Before It's News published an article reporting that Holloway had shouted Allahu Akbar (Arabic for Allah is great) during the incident: The claim appeared concurrently on numerous questionable websites (all with identical wording), but we found no version of that claim reported by a credible news site. Although Las Vegas police didn't release any specifics about what motive might have been behind Holloway's deadly actions, media reports hinted at a non-terroristic impetus: On 21 December 2015, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department (LVMPD) issued a press release [PDF] about the incident which stated that: LVMPD published video of a press conference to Facebook on 21 December 2015: Our attempts to contact the official public information department of the LVMPD have so far been unsuccessful, probably due to the large ongoing investigation into the Vegas strip incident of 20 December 2015. However, an individual in the Homicide division with whom we briefly spoke confirmed that potential ties to Islamic terrorism are not currently a focus of the investigation. The rumor's credibility deficit was so severe that even an InfoWars article described it as from a dubious source [which] cannot be considered genuine at this time. On 21 December 2015, the LVMPD repeatedly addressed iterations of the rumor on Twitter and implored social media users not to spread misinformation about the tragedy:
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