NEW YORK (AP) — 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 courtroom just 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 convicting Sapoiv, 34, of 28 counts of crimes that include murder in aid of racketeering and supporting a foreign terrorist organization. Jurors will return to court no earlier than Feb. 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 sentence for 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 federal jury in New York has not rendered a death sentence that withstood legal appeals in decades, with the last execution in 1954.
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Even before the trial, there was no doubt Saipov was a killer.
His lawyers conceded to the jury that he rented a pickup truck near his New Jersey home, steered it onto the path along the Hudson River and mowed down bicyclists for blocks before crashing into a school bus near the World Trade Center.
He emerged from his truck yelling “God is great,” in Arabic, with pellet and paintball guns in his hands before he was shot by a police officer who thought the guns were real firearms.
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Photos: Remembering the victims of the New York bike path attack
Sons, architects, tourists: A shared fate on the bike path
Three decades had passed since their 1987 graduation from a technology high school in Argentina, but they had kept close through marriages, trips, jobs — mostly as architects — and children.
Some had played volleyball together in school, and as grown-ups, they would meet almost every week for traditional Argentine meat barbecues, or asados.
This week, they gathered in New York for a trip to mark their graduation 30 years ago — a celebration shattered when a man in a rental truck mowed them down as they rode bicycles on a path on the west side of Manhattan.
Five of the group of 10 died. Police called it a terrorist attack.
They hailed from Rosario, Argentina, the country’s third-largest city and the hometown of international soccer star Lionel Messi and guerrilla leader Che Guevara.
“It hurts us to think that these are people who walked the same school halls as we did or that studied in our same classrooms,” said Agustin Riccardi, a senior at the victims’ alma mater, the Polytechnic School of Rosario.
The Argentine tour group formed the bulk of the eight deaths from Tuesday’s attack, victims who reflected New York’s status as a top tourist destination and capital of finance and technology.
The others were a Belgian mother of young sons, a new college graduate working as a software engineer, and a doting son who had recently lost nearly 100 pounds and was getting a bike ride in between meetings at his World Trade Center job.
Now, friends and relatives are remembering the victims — and recounting the circumstances that led them to New York.