Attacker in NYC ‘linked with IS’
THE pickup truck driver who ploughed down a New York cycle path, killing eight people, in the city’s worst attack since September 11, 2001, was associated with Islamic State but “radicalised domestically”, the state’s governor said yesterday.
The driver, identified as Uzbek national named Sayfullo Saipov, mowed down pedestrians and cyclists over a 1.5-kilometre-long stretch of the bike path on Tuesday in an exclusive neighbourhood of Lower Manhattan’s West Side, where children and their parents were preparing to celebrate Halloween.
Police shot Saipov, 29, in the stomach at the end of the rampage, but he was expected to survive.
Handwritten notes in Arabic were found near his vehicle, pledging allegiance to the
jihadist group, the New York Times reported, citing law enforcement officials. Documents found inside the truck included a picture of an IS flag, the New York Post said.
“He’s a depraved coward is what he is, and he was associated with ISIS, and he was radicalised domestically, and he’s a depraved coward,” New York Governor Andrew Cuomo told CNN.
Cuomo said investigators had determined that the suspect, who reportedly entered the United States in 2010, had since shown an interest in IS and its terror tactics, but that there was no evidence so far that others helped him plot the attack.
“Our only evidence to date is that this was an isolated incident that he, himself, performed,” the governor said.
Tuesday’s truck rampage struck in broad daylight was just blocks from the memorial to the September 11, 2001, attacks.
Five of the eight killed were Argentine nationals, part of a group visiting New York from the city of Rosario for a school reunion, the foreign ministry in Buenos Aires said. Brussels said a Belgian woman on a trip with her mother and sister was killed.
Eleven people, including an Argentine and three Belgians, were also injured.
President Donald Trump has denounced the attacker as “very sick” and a “deranged person”, and announced a stepping-up of his “extreme vetting program” for foreign travellers to the country.
The United States “must not” allow Islamic State jihadists to “return, or enter” the country after being defeated overseas, Trump said.
Yesterday the president tweeted that the suspect had entered the United States via a visa lottery programme supported by opposition Democrats.
“We are fighting hard for Merit Based immigration, no more Democrat Lottery Systems.We must get MUCH tougher (and smarter),” Trump tweeted.
Saipov was living in Tampa, Florida and had recently been staying in New Jersey, where the truck was rented, reports said. Law enforcement sources said he was arrested in Missouri on a traffic violation last year.
Police said he drove a rented Home Depot pickup down a bike and pedestrian lane where tourists and NewYorkers were out enjoying brilliant fall sunshine, just after 3pm, before colliding with a school bus, wounding two adults and two children.
The suspect then fled the vehicle brandishing weapons that were subsequently identified as a paintball gun and pellet gun, before being shot in the abdomen by a police officer and taken into custody.
US media said he shouted “Allahu akbar” (“God is greatest”), and NewYork Police Chief James O’Neill confirmed he made a statement when he exited the vehicle that had led investigators to “label this a terrorist event”.
Television footage showed the mangled wreckage of the pickup truck, bicycles crushed to smithereens and bodies wrapped in sheets and lying on the ground.
‘Little bit crazy’
The attacker struck in TriBeCa, one of the most expensive neighbourhoods in the city. In the aftermath of the attack, worried parents and children were seen being evacuated from a nearby public school.
“There was a smell of gunshots,” said John Williams, 22, who arrived at the scene 30 seconds afterward en route to the park. “There was a man lying on the ground. It looked as if he’d been shot.”
“When the cops shot him, everybody started running away and it got a little bit crazy right there. So when I tried to look again, the guy was already down,” a witness who gave his name only as Frank told television network NY1.
Armed police fanned out across the city of 8.5 million, home to Wall Street, Broadway and one of the biggest tourist draws in the United States.
Tuesday’s attack was the first deadly terror-related incident in the US financial and entertainment capital since al-Qaeda hijackers brought down the Twin Towers, killing more than 2,700 people on 9/11.
But a planned Halloween parade went ahead under tight security, and Governor Cuomo has vowed the city would not be cowed by the latest attack, ordering the new World Trade Center to be lit red, white and blue “in honour of freedom and democracy”.
The New York truck attack came 12 months after a pipe bomb exploded in September 2016 in the Chelsea neighbourhood, lightly wounding 31 people. An American of Afghan descent, Ahmad Khan Rahimi, was convicted of terrorism on October 16 in relation to that attack.
In May, a US Navy veteran ploughed a car into pedestrians in Times Square, killing an 18-year-old woman and injuring 22 other people in what de Blasio said was not terror-related.
On May 1, 2010 Pakistani immigrant Faisal Shahzad planted a car bomb in Times Square that failed to explode. He was arrested after boarding a flight to the Middle East and sentenced to life behind bars.