A driver wrought carnage on New Orleans’s famed French Quarter early on New Year’s Day, ramming a pickup truck into a crowd and killing 10 people before being shot to death by police, authorities said.

More than 30 people were injured in the attack, which the FBI is investigating as an act of terrorism.

The driver was killed in a firefight with the police following the attack around 3.15am on Wednesday along Bourbon Street near Canal Street in an area teeming with New Year’s revellers, the FBI said.

The FBI said in a statement that the suspect was a US citizen from Texas. He was driving a Ford pickup that appeared to have been rented, and investigators were working to determine how the suspect got it.

An Islamic State flag, weapons and a “potential” improvised explosive device were found in the vehicle, the FBI said, and other potential bombs “were also located in the French Quarter”.

Investigators were working to determine the suspect’s “potential associations and affiliations with terrorist organisations”, the statement said.

At a news conference, New Orleans mayor LaToya Cantrell described the killings as a “terrorist attack” and the city’s police chief said the act was clearly intentional.

New Orleans police superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick said the driver was “hell-bent on creating the carnage and the damage that he did”.

“It was very intentional behaviour. This man was trying to run over as many people as he could,” Kirkpatrick said.

After the vehicle stopped, the driver emerged and opened fire on responding officers, the police said. Officers returned fire, killing the driver, the police said.

Two officers were wounded and are in stable condition, the police said. They were in addition to 33 people injured in the vehicle attack.

“When I got to work this morning, it was kind of pandemonium everywhere,” Derick Fleming, chief bellhop at the nearby Crowne Plaza hotel, told The Associated Press. “There were a couple of bodies on the ground covered up. The police were looking
for bombs in garbage cans.”

The area is known as a prime New Year’s Eve destination.

Tens of thousands of college football fans were in the city for Wednesday night’s Sugar Bowl playoff game between Georgia and Notre Dame at the nearby Superdome.

The stadium was on lockdown on Wednesday morning, but the game was expected to be played as scheduled.

Both schools expressed condolences to the victims and said they were working with law enforcement to determine if any students, employees or alumni were harmed.

Hours after the attack, three coroner’s office vans were parked on the corner of Bourbon and Canal streets, cordoned off by police tape with crowds of dazed tourists standing around.

Kevin Garcia, 22, told CNN that he saw a truck slamming into people on a sidewalk and heard gunshots.

“A body came flying at me,” he said.

Whit Davis told the network that he heard people yelling and running to the back as he was leaving a nightclub.

“When they finally let us out of the club, the police waved us where to walk and were telling us to get out of the area fast. I saw a few bodies they couldn’t even cover up and tons of people receiving first aid,” said Davis, 22.

The injured were taken to five hospitals, the city’s emergency preparedness department said.

President Joe Biden said the FBI was investigating the “horrific incident” as “an act of terrorism” and that he had directed his team to ensure every resource is available as authorities work to “get to the bottom of what happened as quickly as possible”.

“My heart goes out to the victims and their families who were simply trying to celebrate the holiday,” Biden said in a written statement. “There is no justification for violence of any kind, and we will not tolerate any attack on any of our nation’s communities.”

The attack is the latest example of a vehicle being used as a weapon to carry out mass violence, a trend that has alarmed law enforcement officials and that can be difficult to protect against.

A 50-year-old Saudi doctor ploughed into a Christmas market teeming with holiday shoppers in the German city of Magdeburg last month, killing four women and a nine-year-old boy. A man who drove his SUV through a Christmas parade in suburban Milwaukee in 2021 is serving a life sentence after a judge rejected arguments from him and his family that mental illness drove him to do it. Six people were killed.

An Islamic extremist was sentenced last year to 10 life sentences for killing eight people with a truck on a bike path in Manhattan on Halloween in 2017. Also in 2017, a self-proclaimed admirer of Adolf Hitler slammed his car into counterprotesters at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and is now serving a life sentence.