Trump demands death penalty for the attacker
Donald J. Trump ✔@realDonaldTrump
NYC terrorist was happy as he asked to hang ISIS flag in his hospital room. He killed 8 people, badly injured 12. SHOULD GET DEATH PENALTY!
11:43 PM – Nov 1, 2017
NEW YORK (TIP): The driver who plowed down pedestrians and cyclists on a New York bike path is a “soldier of the caliphate,” the ISIS terror group said on its weekly newspaper.
The attack Tuesday, October 31, killed eight people and left more than a dozen others injured.
“One of the Islamic State soldiers in America, attacked on Tuesday a number of crusaders on a street in New York City, near the monument of those who perished in the 11th of September incursion,” the al-Naba newspaper reported Thursday, November 2.
US President Donald Trump on Thursday, November 2, reiterated his call that the Uzbek immigrant accused of killing eight persons when he drove a truck down a New York City bike path should get the death penalty.
The suspect, Sayfullo Saipov, told investigators he was inspired by watching Islamic State videos and began planning Tuesday’s attack a year ago, according to a criminal complaint filed against him on Wednesday.
Saipov, 29, also said “he felt good about what he had done” and asked for permission to display the flag of the militant group Islamic State in his hospital room, the complaint said.
Trump on Wednesday had suggested sending Saipov to the Guantanamo Bay military prison in Cuba where multiple detainees are held, but on Thursday said that move would have been too complicated.
Saipov faces two charges, one of which carries the death penalty if the government chooses to seek it, Manhattan acting US Attorney Joon Kim said.
The charges are one count of violence and destruction of motor vehicles causing the deaths of eight persons and one count of providing material support and resources to a foreign terrorist organization – Islamic State.
The maximum penalty for the first is death; the maximum for the second life in prison, Kim said.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving member of a pair of ethnic Chechen brothers who killed three people and injured more than 260 when they bombed the 2013 Boston Marathon in an attack inspired by the Al-Qaida militant group, was sentenced to death in 2015. He is the only inmate among the 61 people on federal death row convicted for an act charged as terrorism.
Saipov’s charging document said he waived his rights to remain silent, avoid self-incrimination and have an attorney present when he agreed to speak to investigators from his bed at Bellevue Hospital Center in Manhattan, where he was being treated after being shot by a police officer.
It said he was particularly motivated by a video where Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of Islamic State, exhorted Muslims in the United States and elsewhere to support the group’s cause.
Details that emerged at his initial court appearance Wednesday paint a picture of a man who was so devoted to ISIS, he wanted to display the terror group’s flag in his hospital room, documents show.
Saipov planned even more carnage after the deadly attack in Lower Manhattan, according to a criminal complaint. The 29-year-old Uzbek native planned to continue striking pedestrians on the Brooklyn Bridge on Tuesday, he told investigators, according to a criminal complaint.
Instead, he crashed his truck into a school bus in Lower Manhattan and then jumped out, brandishing imitation firearms, officials said. New York police Officer Ryan Nash fired nine shots at him, wounding him in the abdomen, before police took him into custody.
Saipov picked Halloween to carry out the deadliest attack in New York since 9/11 because he believed more people would be out on the streets for the holiday, according to the criminal complaint. More than a dozen people were also injured Tuesday.
Saipov had about 90 videos and 3,800 images on a cell phone featuring ISIS propaganda, including video of a beheading, according to the complaint.