Terror charges filed
Prosecutors say suspect inspired by ISIS videos, sought carnage
Federal prosecutors file charges accusing the driver in the New York City truck attack of carrying out a long-planned plot, spurred by ISIS propaganda videos.
NEW YORK — Federal prosecutors Wednesday filed charges accusing the driver in the Manhattan truck attack of carrying out a long-planned plot, spurred by Islamic State propaganda videos, to kill people celebrating Halloween.
The charges, filed just over 24 hours after the deadliest terror attack on New York City since Sept. 11, 2001, placed the case in the civilian courts even as President Donald Trump denounced the U.S. criminal justice system as “a joke” and “a laughingstock.”
The charges describe the driver, Sayfullo Saipov, 29, as a voracious consumer and meticulous student of ISIS propaganda, and detail how he said he was spurred to attack by an ISIS video questioning the killing of Muslims in Iraq. They say he began planning the attack about a year ago and, after taking a test run in a Home Depot rental truck last week, chose Halloween to carry it out because more people would be on the streets.
The charges were filed in civilian court, and not the military system set up for foreign terrorists, a decision that flew in the face of Trump’s broadsides against the criminal justice system. Trump said he was open to trying Saipov instead in military court at the U.S. prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
Saipov, accused of killing eight people and injuring 12 in the attack, was pushed into a Manhattan federal courtroom in a wheelchair just after 6 p.m. Wednesday. He sat slightly hunched, his rail-thin body dressed in a gray shirt and gray pants. His hair stuck up slightly in the back. His hands and feet were chained. Five guards stood behind him.
A Russian interpreter spoke into a microphone, and Saipov, an immigrant from Uzbekistan, fitted an earpiece over his long beard and sharp features. When Magistrate Judge Barbara C. Moses asked if he understood the proceedings, Saipov, in a strong, clear voice, responded in English, “Yes, ma’am.”
He nodded along as Moses read his rights but sat impassively when she read the charges against him: one count of providing material support to terrorists and one count of violence and destruction of a motor vehicle causing death. Death penalty possible
The vehicle charge, which carries the possibility of the death penalty, raised the prospect of a rare capital case being brought to trial in New York.
David E. Patton, the chief federal public defender in New York City, who was representing Saipov, asked that he receive a daily change of dressing on the wounds he suffered after being shot by a police officer.
A major stretch of the West Side Highway that runs alongside the bike path remained closed on Wednesday as part of an active crime scene. The attack was the deadliest terror attack in New York City since Sept. 11, and at the news conference on Wednesday, Mayor Bill de Blasio vowed that New Yorkers would not live in fear.
“What New Yorkers showed already is we will not change,” de Blasio said. “We will not be cowed. We will not be thrown off by anything.”
By Wednesday, three of the injured had been released from hospitals and nine people remained hospitalized, four of them critically injured but in stable condition, said Daniel Nigro, the commissioner of the city Fire Department. He said the injuries ranged from the amputation of two limbs to serious head, neck and back trauma.
Those killed came from as few as six blocks from where the attack started and as far as thousands of miles away: Nicholas Cleves, 23, of downtown Manhattan; Darren Drake, 32, of New Milford, New Jersey; Anne Laure Decadt, 31, of Belgium; and five Argentine tourists who traveled to New York for a 30-year high school reunion. They were identified by the Argentine government as Hernán Mendoza, 47; Diego Angelini, 47; Alejandro Pagnucco, 47; Ariel Erlij, 48; and Hernán Ferruchi, 47.
The grievous injuries to victims, the scope of the inquiry and Saipov’s path toward extremism all began coming into view. The FBI, after saying it was trying to learn more about a second Uzbek man in connection with the attack, announced that investigators had found the man, Mukhammadzoir Kadirov, 32 in New Jersey. It was not clear why federal authorities wanted to question him in connection with the attack.
The authorities questioned Saipov after he waived his Miranda rights at a hospital, the complaint says. They were also questioning Saipov’s wife, Nozima Odilova, who was cooperating, law enforcement officials said. The couple live in Paterson, N.J., and have three children.
As investigators looked into whether Saipov’s Uzbek contacts may have handed him off to an ISIS operative, they pieced together parts of his past, law enforcement officials said. He attended a wedding in Florida of an Uzbek man who was under scrutiny by the FBI. But his attendance did not trigger a separate investigation of him.
Investigators were still looking into whether Saipov had links to other federal counterterrorism inquiries. ISIS videos on phone
On Saipov’s cellphone, FBI agents found 90 videos, including of ISIS fighters killing prisoners and of instructions for making an explosive device, according to the criminal complaint. They also found 3,800 images, among them some of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS. The complaint said Saipov reported being inspired in particular by a video in which al-Baghdadi “questioned what Muslims in the United States and elsewhere were doing to respond to the killing of Muslims in Iraq.”
The FBI was uncovering details that sent agents on a far-ranging chase for leads.
But several crucial facts remained unclear. It was not known if the FBI was still investigating the Uzbek man whose wedding Saipov had attended. And as investigators built out concentric circles of his associates, they were still looking at whether Saipov had direct connections with ISIS operatives.
Even so, the federal complaint filed against Saipov said he hewed closely to instructions last November in an ISIS magazine, Rumiyah, for a vehicle attack. After plowing his Home Depot rental truck down a bike path along the Hudson River that teemed with pedestrians and cyclists and crashing into a school bus, the complaint said, he jumped out of the truck, yelled “Allahu akbar” (Arabic for “God is great”) and waved a paintball gun and a pellet gun.
The Rumiyah instructions called for followers to carry secondary weapons so they could continue an attack after crashing the vehicle, and Saipov did so, the complaint said: He had a bag of knives in the truck “but was unable to reach them before exiting.”
Investigators found a handwritten note in Arabic and English 10 feet from the driver’s side door, as the front of the truck sat smashed in, with soil strewn across the street that had been knocked out of a nearby planter. According to the complaint, the note detailed a pledge that echoed language used by ISIS: “Islamic Supplication. It will endure.”
“He appears to have followed almost to a T the instructions that ISIS has put out,” John Miller, of the NYPD, said.