Islamic extremist who killed eight people on New York bike path convicted

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 on Thursday of 28 federal crimes and could face the death penalty.

Sayfullo Saipov bowed his head as he heard the verdict in the trial for an attack that prosecutors said was inspired by his reverence for the Islamic State militant group. Saipov was tried in a Manhattan courtroom just a few blocks from where the attack ended.

The dozen jurors deliberated for about seven hours over two days before convicting Saipov, 34, of crimes including murder in aid of racketeering and supporting a foreign terrorist organization. The jury will return to court within days 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.

Even before the trial, there was little doubt Saipov was a killer.

His lawyers conceded to the jury that he rented a pickup truck near his New Jersey home, steered it on to the path along the Hudson River and mowed down bicyclists for blocks before crashing into a school bus near the World Trade Center.

The vehicle attack killed a woman visiting from Belgium with her family, five friends from Argentina and two Americans. It left others with permanent injuries, including a woman who lost her legs.

The defense asked jurors to acquit Saipov of racketeering charges, saying he intended to die a martyr and was not conspiring with the Islamic State organization, despite voluminous amounts of propaganda from the group found on his electronic devices and at his home.

Saipov, who moved legally to the US from Uzbekistan in 2010 and lived in Ohio and Florida before joining his family in Paterson, New Jersey, did not testify at his trial.

Prosecutors said Saipov attacked civilians to impress the Islamic State group so he could become a member and appeared pleased with his work, smiling when he spoke to an FBI agent afterward.

His wife, Marion Van Reeth, spoke of waking up in a hospital to learn her legs had been amputated.

Joe Biden instituted a moratorium on executions for federal crimes after taking office.

It has been a decade since a jury in New York last considered the death penalty.

Federal juries in Brooklyn twice handed up a death sentence to a man who murdered two New York police detectives, once in 2007 and again in 2013, but both sentences were tossed out on appeal. A judge ultimately ruled the killer was intellectually disabled.

In 2001, just weeks before the September 11 attacks, federal jurors in Manhattan declined to impose a death sentence on two men convicted in the deadly bombings of two US embassies in Africa after their lawyers urged them not to make the defendants into martyrs.