Prosecutors Describe Driver’s Plan to Kill in Manhattan Terror Attack<br />The charges, filed just over 24 hours after the deadliest terror attack on New York City since Sept. 11, 2001, placed the case in<br />the civilian courts even as President Trump denounced the American criminal justice system as “a joke” and “a laughingstock.”<br />The charges describe the driver, Sayfullo Saipov, 29, as a voracious consumer<br />and meticulous student of ISIS propaganda, and detail how he said he was spurred to attack by an ISIS video questioning the killing of Muslims in Iraq.<br />The Rumiyah instructions called for followers to carry secondary weapons so they could continue an attack after crashing the vehicle,<br />and Mr. Saipov did so, the complaint said: He had a bag of knives in the truck “but was unable to reach them before exiting.” There was also a stun gun on the floor of the truck near the driver’s seat, according to the complaint.<br />Even so, the federal complaint filed against Mr. Saipov said he hewed closely to<br />instructions last November in an ISIS magazine, Rumiyah, for a vehicle attack.<br />In the two months since Mr. Saipov “decided to use a truck in order to inflict maximum<br />damage against civilians,” the complaint said, he began plotting assiduously.<br />After plowing his Home Depot rental truck down a bike path along the Hudson River<br />that teemed with pedestrians and cyclists and crashing into a school bus, the complaint said, he jumped out of the truck, yelled “Allahu akbar” (Arabic for “God is great”) and waved a paintball gun and a pellet gun.
