NY attacker linked to IS

EIGHT DEAD: COPS SHOOT UZBEK NATIONAL BUT HE IS EXPECTED TO SURVIVE

Investigators find out he has showed interest in terror tactics.

The pick-up truck driver who plowed down a New York cycle path, killing eight people in the city’s worst attack since September 11, was associated with the Islamic State group but “radicalised domestically”, the state’s governor said yesterday.

The driver, identified as Uzbek national Sayfullo Saipov, mowed down pedestrians and cyclists over a 1.6km 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 and he was associated with ISIS,” New York governor Andrew Cuomo told CNN.

Cuomo said investigators had determined that the suspect, who reportedly entered the US 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 was in broad daylight just blocks from the memorial to the September 11, 2001 att acks. 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 wounded.

President Donald Trump denounced the attacker as “very sick and deranged”, announcing a stepping-up of his “extreme vetting programme” for foreign visitors.

Yesterday, the president tweeted that the suspect had entered the US via a visa lottery programme. New York police chief James O’Neill confirmed that investigators had labelled it a terrorist event. –