ISIS-inspired terrorist who killed eight people on a New York bike path in 2017 convicted on all counts
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An Islamic extremist who killed eight people with a speeding truck in a 2017 rampage on a popular New York City bike path was convicted Thursday of federal crimes and could face the death penalty.
Sayfullo Saipov bowed his head as he heard the verdict in a Manhattan courthouse a few blocks from where the attack ended.
Prosecutors said the Halloween rampage was inspired by his reverence for the Islamic State militant group.
The dozen jurors deliberated for about seven hours over two days before sentencing Saipov, 34, on 28 counts of crimes including murder in aid of organized crime and support of a foreign terrorist organization.
Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov, 34, repeatedly proclaimed his support for ISIS following the 2017 attack, during which he allegedly plowed through a crowd of people on a New York bike path.
Jurors will return to court no earlier than February 6 to hear more evidence to help them decide whether he should be executed or spend the rest of his life in prison.
A death warrant for Saipov, a citizen of Uzbekistan, It would be an extreme rarity in New York. The state no longer has capital punishment and the last state execution was in 1963.
A federal jury in New York has not handed down a death sentence that has withstood legal appeals in decades, with the last execution in 1954.
Even before the trial, there was no doubt that Saipov was a murderer.
His attorneys admitted to the jury that he rented a van near his New Jersey home, drove it down the road along the Hudson River and plowed past cyclists for blocks before crashing into a school bus near the World Trade Center.
He got out of his truck shouting ‘God is great’, in Arabic, with pellet guns and paintballs in his hands before a police officer shot him because he thought they were real firearms.
Vehicle attack killed a woman from Belgium visiting with her family, five friends from Argentina and two Americans. She left others with permanent injuries, including a woman who lost her legs.
Sayfullo Saipov bowed his head as he heard the verdict in a Manhattan courthouse a few blocks from where the attack ended.
Saipov, a citizen of Uzbekistan, would be an extreme rarity in New York. The state no longer has capital punishment and the last state execution was in 1963
A New York City police officer stands next to a body covered in a white sheet near a vandalized bicycle along a bike path.
“Her actions were reckless, horrific, and there is no justification for them,” defense attorney David Patton told the jury during the trial.
The defense asked the jury to acquit Saipov of the extortion charges, saying he intended to die a martyrdom and was not colluding with the Islamic State organization, despite voluminous amounts of the group’s propaganda found on his electronic devices. and in his house.
Saipov did not testify at his trial.
He sat silent every day, unlike at a 2019 pre-trial hearing where he insisted on asking the judge why he should stand trial for eight deaths when “thousands and thousands of Muslims are dying around the world.”
Saipov legally moved to the US from Uzbekistan in 2010 and lived in Ohio and Florida before joining his family in Paterson, New Jersey.
The vehicle attack killed a woman visiting Belgium with her family, five friends from Argentina and two Americans. She left others with permanent injuries, including a woman who lost her legs.
A paramedic looks at a body covered by a white sheet along a bike path after the riot
A group pauses, with some in prayer, at a makeshift memorial on a New York City bike path.
Prosecutors said Saipov attacked civilians to impress the Islamic State group so he could become a member and he seemed pleased with his work, smiling when he spoke to an FBI agent afterwards.
Among those who testify Several family members from Belgium were injured in the attack. Aristide Melissas, a father, said he had challenged family members to bike rides to the World Trade Center, with the loser paying for the ice cream. When he was hit by Saipov’s truck, he fractured his skull. He underwent brain surgery.
His wife, Marion Van Reeth, spoke of waking up in a hospital to find that her legs had been amputated.
Saipov’s lawyers have said the death penalty process was irreparably tainted by former President Donald Trump, who he tweeted a day after the attack that Saipov ‘SHOULD GET THE DEATH PENALTY!’
Subsequently, President Joe Biden instituted a moratorium on executions for federal crimes.
Until Saipov’s trial, Biden’s Justice Department, under the direction of Attorney General Merrick Garland, had not launched any new attempts to obtain the death penalty in a federal case. But Garland has allowed US prosecutors to continue advocating capital punishment in cases handed down from previous administrations.
It’s been a decade since a jury in New York last considered the death penalty.
Federal juries in Brooklyn twice sentenced a man who murdered two NYPD detectives to death, once in 2007 and again in 2013, but both sentences were overturned on appeal. A judge eventually ruled that the killer had an intellectual disability.
In 2001, just weeks before the 9/11 attacks, federal juries in Manhattan refused to impose the death penalty on two men convicted of the deadly bombings of two US embassies in Africa. Lawyers for the men had urged jurors not to make martyrs of the defendants.