Eight people were killed and almost a dozen injured when a man drove his pick-up truck down a busy bicycle path for almost a mile in Manhattan, New York city. He crushed cyclists and pedestrians with his rented vehicle before slamming into a school bus, injured two adults and two children. The devastating aftermath of the attack was captured in videos (below) by people present at the scene.
The man jumped out of his vehicle and reportedly screamed “Allahu Akbar” before running away, brandishing what appeared to be two guns in each hand, as you can watch in the video above (and below). He was, however, shot by a police official in the abdomen and injured before being captured and arrested. The guns turned out to be pellet and paintball guns.
The suspect was later identified as Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov, a 29-year-old Uber driver from Uzbekistan, who had been living in the United States since 2010. He was driving a rental Home Depot truck, which is being investigated further.
“This was an act of terror, and a particularly cowardly act of terror,” New York Mayor Bill de Blasio said at a press conference, “aimed at innocent civilians, aimed at people going about their lives who had no idea what was about to hit them.”
Of the eight people killed, five belonged to a group of Argentine friends, and one was identified as a Belgian national. Some witnesses to the attack shared their harrowing experience:
However, remaining true to the New York spirit, in spite of a high alert in the city, citizens flocked in thousands to the Halloween Parade just hours after the deadly attack.
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