Terror charges filed in New York City truck attack

PHOENIX — Prosecutors filed terrorism charges Wednesday against a man suspected of driving a truck down a New York City bike path and killing eight people.

The charges against 29-year-old Sayfullo Saipov could bring the death penalty.

Saipov allegedly told investigators he decided to carry out the attack in response to the Islamic State terror group’s online calls to action.

Saipov left a handwritten note referring to ISIS at the scene and was thought to have become radicalized in the United States.

Authorities said Saipov watched ISIS videos on his cellphone and picked Halloween for the attack on a bike lane in lower Manhattan because he knew more people would be out on the streets.

Afterward, as he lay wounded in the hospital, he asked to display the ISIS flag in his room and “stated that he felt good about what he had done,” prosecutors said in court papers.

John Miller, deputy New York police commissioner for intelligence, said Saipov “appears to have followed, almost exactly to a T, the instructions that ISIS has put out.”

He was charged with providing material support to a terrorist group and committing violence and destruction of motor vehicles.

Investigators were looking to question a second person in the case, Mukhammadzoir Kadirov, for a short time, but the FBI later said it was no longer looking to speak with him.

Mirrakhmat Muminov, a fellow Uzbek truck driver whom Saipov met while living in Ohio, said Saipov never spoke about ISIS, but he could tell Saipov held more radical views.

Muminov also said Saipov was “not happy with his life” and would get into arguments with his friends and family.

Saipov is from Uzbekistan and came to the U.S. legally in 2010. He has a Florida driver’s license but may have been staying in New Jersey.

At least eight people were killed and 12 more injured in the incident near Chambers and West streets, just blocks from some of Manhattan’s most popular tourist sites, such as the Sept. 11 memorial.

Police said Saipov was shot by an officer. He was hospitalized.

He was carrying paintball and pellet guns along with multiple knives when he was shot.

Saipov allegedly barreled along the bike path in a rented Home Depot truck for the equivalent of about 14 blocks, or around eight-tenths of a mile, before slamming into a small yellow school bus. The mayhem and the burst of police gunfire set off panic in the neighborhood and left the pavement strewn with mangled bicycles and bodies that were soon covered with sheets.

A man who was riding in an Uber along the West Side Highway near Chambers Street said he saw several bleeding people on the ground after a truck struck several people. Another witness said the truck had also collided with a small bus and one other vehicle.

Tom Gay, a school photographer, was on Warren Street and heard people saying there was an accident. He went down to West Street and a woman came around the corner shouting, “He has a gun! He has a gun!”

Gay said he stuck his head around the corner and saw a slender man in a blue track suit running southbound on West Street holding a gun. He said there was a heavyset man pursuing him.

He said he heard five or six shots and the man in the tracksuit fell to the ground, gun still raised in the air. He said a man came over and kicked the gun out of his hand.

Uber driver Chen Yi said he saw a truck plow into people on a popular bike path adjacent to the West Side Highway. He said he then heard seven to eight shots and then police pointing a gun at a man kneeling on the pavement.

“I saw a lot of blood over there. A lot of people on the ground,” Yi said.

His passenger, Dmitry Metlitsky, said he also saw police standing near a man who was on his knees with his hands up, and another man bleeding on the ground nearby.

Both New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio went to the scene. President Donald Trump was briefed on the situation.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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