The terrorist truck driver who carved a 14-block path of destruction along a lower Manhattan bike path was celebrating the deadly attack, sources said Wednesday.
Sayfullo Saipov, 29, was rejoicing in his room at Bellevue Hospital after killing eight people and wounding 12 others along the Hudson River Tuesday, sources told the Daily News.
“He’s talking. He’s laughing. He’s very happy with what he did,” said a source who was briefed by a hospital staffer on the floor. “He feels accomplished.”
The ISIS-inspired Saipov was said to be in critical but stable condition after a sharp-shooting NYPD cop put a bullet in his abdomen following the Halloween assault.
Saipov planned the attack “for a number of weeks,” said NYPD Deputy Commissioner for Counterterrorism John Miller.
“He seemed to have followed almost to a T the instructions ISIS had put out” on how to carry out a truck-borne attack, Miller added.
Investigators found at the scene the paintball and pellet guns Saipov was brandishing. Inside his rented Home Depot truck, they discovered multiple knives and a handwritten note in Arabic.
“The gist of the note was, ‘The Islamic State would endure forever,’” Miller said.
The suspect arrived in the U.S. from his native Uzbekistan in March 2010, authorities said.
Saipov was never the subject of an FBI or NYPD investigation but he was on the radar of the authorities.
Investigators were in the early stages of digging into his past and terror links.
“It appears that he will have some connectivity (to people) who were the subjects of an investigation though he himself was not,” Miller said.
Earlier in the day, Gov. Cuomo said that Saipov was radicalized in the U.S. in the last seven years.
“(A)fter he came to the United States is when he started to become informed about ISIS and radical Islamic tactics,” Cuomo said on CNN. “Again, ISIS has gotten it down to a simple formula that they can put on the internet and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to rent a car, rent a truck. But they are cowards and they are depraved.”
The suspect lived in an apartment in Paterson, New Jersey, with his wife, two young daughters and infant son, neighbors said.
Saipov was known as a genial family man who largely kept to himself.
“He always seemed pleasant every time I seen him, nothing out of the ordinary that would be shocking,” said a 32-year-old neighbor who identified himself as Keith.
Altana Dimitrovska, 63, said she often saw Saipov in the morning bringing one of his kids to kindergarten.
“I spoke to him once,” she said. “I said, ‘Do you go to work, or anything?’ Because I never saw him go to work.”
Saipov said yes but didn’t elaborate, she recalled.
He moved to New Jersey after stints in Ohio and Florida where he was known as a pleasant guy who showed no interest in radical Islam.
“He was a very good person when I knew him,” Kobiljon Matkarov, 37, of Fort Myers, Fla., told the New York Times.
“He liked the U.S. He seemed very lucky, and all the time he was happy and talking like everything is OK. He did not seem like a terrorist, but I did not know him from the inside.”
After arriving in the U.S. from the Uzbekistan capital of Tashkent, Saipov settled in the Cincinnati area.
He lived with a fellow Uzbeki family before eventually moving to Florida.
His father in Uzbekistan had asked the family patriarch to house his son while the younger Saipov tried to get his green card, according to the Cincinnati Enquirer.
“He was really calm,” Dilnoza Abdusamatova, who was a teenager when Saipov moved into her family’s townhouse, told The Enquirer. “He always used to work. He wouldn’t go to parties or anything. He only used to come home and rest and leave and go back to work.”
Saipov wed his wife, an Uzbek named Nozima Odilova, in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, in March 2013. At the time, he was 25 and she was 19, according to CNN.
Saipov’s wife was cooperating with authorities and has denied having prior knowledge of the attack, NBC News reported.
Authorities on Wednesday released a timeline of the attack.
Saipov rented a truck from a Home Depot in the New Jersey town of Passaic about 2:06 p.m.
He crossed into the city via the George Washington Bridge about 2:43 p.m. before heading south on the West Side Highway.
At 3:04 p.m., Saipov’s truck entered the bike lane at Houston St.
He barreled into numerous pedestrians and cyclists, triggering a flood of 911 calls at 3:08 p.m.
About the same time, civilians who witnessed the carnage alerted a pair of NYPD officers who were in the area responding to an unrelated call.
By then, Saipov’s truck had slammed into a school bus and he emerged from the crippled vehicle yelling in Arabic “God is great!”
As Saipov wandered into the street, waving his pellet and paintball guns, Officer Brian Nash, 25, pulled out his service weapon and opened fire. Saipov crumpled to the ground, ending the threat.
An Uber spokeswoman said Saipov drove for the ride sharing-company and records show Saipov was also licensed as a commercial truck driver and formed a pair of businesses in Ohio.
Saipov’s mother, father and sister were being questioned in Uzbekistan, a source in the country’s security services told Radio Free Europe.
Cuomo called the driver a “depraved coward,” and says the attack “did not instill terror” among hardy New Yorkers.
“Don’t let them win. They are called terrorists. They want to impart terror. They didn’t,” Cuomo added.
It’s unlikely that Saipov had help, Cuomo said.
“The best evidence we have is that he was a ‘lone wolf’ model,” Cuomo told CBS’ “This Morning.”
Saipov was on the radar of federal authorities, but it was not clear if he was the focus of a probe or tangentially associated with an investigation, according to The New York Times.
“In many ways this was a, quote unquote, classic case of radicalization of a domestic jihadist who associated with ISIS. This is their new playbook,” Cuomo said
He added that Saipov had some contact with law enforcement since moving to the U.S. in 2010 — all for minor traffic issues.
“He had some vehicular violations,” Cuomo said. “The State Police actually helped him and his truck out of a ditch at one time.”
Investigators are digging through the killer’s social media to see what connections he may have had, the governor said.
“But, there is no evidence now that it was part of a larger conspiracy, larger plot. This is the evolution of the jihad tactics, right? It’s no longer geographically isolated.
“The internet has given them a global platform and a global training ground. They have a very simple play: rent a car; rent a truck; create mayhem,” he added.
(First reported by NY Daily News) http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/manhattan/terrorist-sayfullo-saipov-brags-deadly-nyc-truck-attack-article-1.3603698 (November 1, 2017)
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