The 29-year-old was ‘radicalized domestically’ after immigrating from Uzbekistan in 2010 and neighbors recall a difficult man who argued with fellow Uzbeks

Sayfullo Saipov, the suspect in a New York City truck attack that left eight people dead and a dozen wounded, was a legal permanent resident of the United States who was “radicalized domestically” and carried out the attack “in the name of Isis”, officials said on Wednesday.

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Saipov, a 29-year-old who came to the United States from Uzbekistan in 2010 on a diversity visa, “appears to have followed almost exactly to a T the instructions that Isis has put out in its social media channels” for carrying out an attack, the New York police department deputy commissioner, John Miller, said. It appeared Saipov had been planning the attack for a number of weeks, he said.

Handwritten notes in Arabic recovered at the scene of the attack included symbols and words with the basic message “that the Islamic State would endure forever”, Miller said.

While Saipov was not himself the subject of a previous NYPD or FBI investigations, he did have “some connectivity” to people who had been the subject of investigation, Miller said.

In 2015, prosecutors announced charges against two Uzbek nationals living in Brooklyn for allegedly attempting to join Islamic State militants in Syria. It was unclear if Saipov’s connections were to subjects in this investigation or another.

The justice department announced last Friday that one of those two men, Abdurasul Hasanovich Juraboev, a 27-year-old Uzbek citizen living in Brooklyn, had been sentenced to 15 years in prison for conspiring to provide material support to Isis.

New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, said on Wednesday morning that Saipov was “associated with Isis” and said he appeared to have been “radicalized domestically”.

“After he came to the United States is when he started to become informed about Isis and radical Islamic tactics,” Cuomo added in a CNN interview on Wednesday.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Investigators work at the scene of the attack where a man driving a truck killed eight people in Manhattan. Photograph: Justin Lane/EPA

Saipov worked as an Uber driver and had lived in Ohio, Florida and most recently New Jersey.

Saipov is suspected of mowing down people as he drove a rented Home Depot truck down a cycle path in lower Manhattan, not far from the World Trade Center. Police said he rented the truck on Tuesday early afternoon.

One neighbor in Paterson, New Jersey, where Saipov is believed to have been living, told the Guardian they had also seen Saipov with a rented Home Depot truck in recent weeks.

Carlos Batista said he thought it was strange when Saipov rented a Home Depot van, but left it parked across the street for days.

“I started seeing a Home Depot truck about three weeks ago,” said Batista. “He left it here for about a week, brought it back [to Home Depot] and got another one a couple days later.

“I never saw anybody rent something for that long,” Batista said. The neighbor also said he thought it was odd that Saipov never appeared to be doing any work with the truck. Saipov, Batista said, would, “get in a work truck, and you come back not dirty, with no materials. It’s weird.”

Batista saw Saipov three or four times a week for about a year. He said Saipov also appeared to be with two other men most of the time. “I saw him with those two guys more than I saw him with his wife.”

“First time I met him, I had an altercation with the two guys he’s always with,” said Batista. But Saipov calmed the situation, he said. “To me, he was a peacemaker.”

Ohio marriage license

An Ohio marriage license shows that Saipov married a 19-year-old Uzbek woman, Nozima Odilova, in 2013. Both husband and wife listed Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, as their birthplace.



Officials confirmed Saipov had entered the US in 2010 through the diversity visa program, also known as the green card lottery, which grants 50,000 visas each year to people from parts of the world with relatively low immigration rates over the previous five years. Donald Trump on Wednesday attacked Democrats over the program, saying it needed to be eliminated “as soon as possible” and the US needed “to get much tougher”.

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In 2015, more than 4,300 people from Uzbekistan entered the US using the visa program, with about half settling in the New York area, according to the New York Times.

Dilfuza Iskhakova, who lives in Cincinnati, Ohio, told the Guardian that Saipov had stayed with her for several months about six years ago after arriving from Uzbekistan. “He seemed like a nice guy, but he didn’t talk much,” Iskhakova said. “He only went to work and came back. He used to work at a warehouse.”

Iskhakova said her family had lost contact with Saipov and she thought he had moved from Ohio to Florida, then to the New York area, and that he now had a wife and two young children.

Mirrakhmat Muminov, a Uzbek community activist who lives in Ohio, told Reuters and BBC News that he knew Saipov and that he had appeared to have been radicalized in the United States. He described Saipov as an aggressive loner who was not very popular with his own community, and who sometimes argued with other Uzbeks over his “radical views”.

“He was not well educated and had no knowledge of the Qur’an before arriving in the US,” Muminov told BBC News. “At the beginning of his time here, he was a normal sort of person.”

CBS News reported on Wednesday morning, citing unnamed sources, that Saipov had talked to investigators from his hospital bed and told them that he would have continued his attack and injured more people if he had not crashed.

Law enforcement officials had interviewed Saipov at Bellevue hospital in Manhattan, Miller said, declining “to go into his statements in any specificity”.

‘Erratic customer’

In Paterson, New Jersey, the FBI had sealed off a block and a half area surrounding Genessee Avenue, where Saipov was believed to have lived for a few months. The street, in a busy, working-class neighborhood with lots of traffic, includes a row of modest, two-story multi-family houses.

“This neighborhood is nice and quiet,” Mildred Malave, a Puerto Rican woman who was “raised in Paterson” said as she surveyed a long line of news cameras pointed down the street. “We’re shocked. Yes, we are.”



FBI agents were still investigating the house on Wednesday morning, and brought out a garbage bag of evidence.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Police in Paterson, New Jersey, on Wednesday. Photograph: Andrew Gombert/EPA

At the Farm Boy Fresh Supermarket in Paterson, Saipov had been an “erratic customer” who regularly argued over the price of a 12-pack of Canada Dry Ginger Ale, the New York Post reported. “He would call the cashiers dumb, uneducated,” an unnamed store manager was quoted as saying.

Less than a block from Saipov’s house is the Omar mosque. Reports addressing whether Saipov had worshipped at the mosque were conflicting, with some neighbors telling the Record, a local paper, that he had, and some worshippers at the mosque saying that they had never seen him there. The mosque itself is not under investigation, law enforcement officials told the Record.

Paterson, New Jersey, has a large and diverse immigrant and Muslim population, and the city has not escaped suspicion following terror attacks of the past. The NYPD had ordered surveillance of the Omar mosque in 2006, according to a Pulitzer Prize-winning Associated Press investigation of the department’s surveillance of Muslim Americans. The surveillance program, which included the use of informants called “mosque crawlers”, was challenged by the American Civil Liberties Union as “discriminatory and unjustified”. A lawsuit brought by the ACLU and others led to a settlement in early 2017 that required new standards for NYPD surveillance of political and religious activity, including installing a “civilian representative” within the NYPD, according to the ACLU.

Just a few blocks from Saipov’s home, on the main commercial strip, it is easy to tell Paterson is home to many Middle Eastern families. The Taza Cafe serves manakeesh fatayer, a Lebanese pastry, al-Basha serves a sampling of Middle Eastern meats, nearby is the Middle Eastern restaurant Salah Edin, there are slices at Alaeddin’s pizza, and Beirut restaurant has a hookah bar.

New York’s governor repeatedly called Saipov a “depraved coward” in a CNN interview. “I resist the temptation to delve into who they are and why. We know why. They hate America,” Cuomo said. “We have the Statue of Liberty in our harbor holding the torch that says freedom and democracy. It’s repugnant to them.”

Additional reporting by Michael McGowan and Shaun Walker