On 9 January, in the Southern District Court of New York, the trial of the Uzbek Sayfullo Saipov will begin, accused of being the perpetrator of the terrorist attack of 31 January 2017 in which 8 people were killed. Among the victims were five Argentines from the city of Rosario, who had traveled to New York to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the graduates of the Polytechnic University: Hernán Mendoza, Diego Angelini, Alejandro Pagnucco, Ariel Erlij and Hernán Ferruchi.
Infobae spoke to Juan Felix Martelloexpert on the prevention of money laundering and terrorist financing and lawyer for Anna Evansthe widow of Hernan Mendoza.
– Doctor Marteau, what were the events like on the day of the attack?
– On October 31, 2017, this Halloween, this Uzbek immigrant named Saipov rented a truck at the Home Depot in New Jersey. From there he crossed the George Washington Bridge which connects to Manhattan and headed into the area known as Lower Manhattan near the 9/11 Memorial. On that avenue that runs along the Hudson River there is a park, a bike path. In this context there were friends from the Polytechnic School who had traveled from Rosario, where Hernán Mendoza and his closest friends from that important stage in his life were. Saipov decided to enter the bike lane area with the truck and ran them over killing 5 and also killing three other people of Belgian and American descent. It happened in the afternoon, he rented the car around two in the afternoon and 45 minutes later he produced this attack. The van drove on, Saipov had the intention—as he later stated—to kill as many people as possible, and ended up crashing into a school bus. This resulted in the vehicle being stopped. The driver got out with two toy pistols, began walking around the area, and was subdued by a New York City police officer who shot him in the stomach. This allowed him to be arrested and today he faces an important trial in which the federal prosecutor is asking for the death penalty. It is an extremely relevant fact in terms of what a terrorist attack in the form proposed by ISIS means. And also because it is a case in which Argentine citizens are involved in one of the most serious episodes we know of in relation to what happened in Argentina with the AMIA attack.
-What are the charges against Saipov?
– In addition to the charge of manslaughter and culpable injury, they are charged with the commission of the crime of materially supporting a designated terrorist organization. This is interesting because Argentine legislation does not recognize this criminal type. US lawmakers have decided to criminalize anyone who offers any kind of material support or resource to a terrorist organization previously designated by the US government. In this case, whoever offers himself as an element of support to Isis is himself with his body, with his will. It should be noted that this ISIS terrorist organization was previously designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the Secretary of State within a legislative framework that has been operating in the United States for many years, which is the list of terrorists for their prosecution or Freeze i your assets.
– According to what is known so far, Saipov radicalized right there, in the United States, how was this process?
Saipov was around 29 when the events occurred. He had obtained the Green Card in 2010 with a system that works with a multi-ethnic distribution of immigration quotas. He has been advantaged by this lottery system for granting settlement visas. It seemed that he didn’t belong to any radicalized group, he came from a family that didn’t seem to have too many deprivations and he had come to the United States with the dream of being able to integrate into society, to work. He started working as a truck driver, he also married an Uzbek immigrant, had a family with her. But I guess frustrations have crept in, I don’t know the details, I hope the trial can reveal a little more about these details, they are important to understanding how a terrorist’s head works. According to the account of some witnesses, they said that he was not an apparently violent person. However, the closeness he apparently had with groups that already had a more extremist orientation led him to rapid radicalization in the years leading up to the attack. Between 2015 and 2016 this rapid, extreme process of radicalization took place which led him to the attack. Somehow he achieved the goals of the radicalization program that ISIS had mounted in a very ingenious way.
– How is this program?
– ISIS was a terrorist organization that significantly innovated in the use of communication. The use of the Internet and social networks as an essential link for his goal of producing terror in Western society. In the fight against “crusaders and heretics”, in the language of Isis, what all followers of Islam should do is do damage wherever they are. ISIS therefore understood that communication, the virtual world, made it possible to convert the soldiers of the organization to those who were not structurally part of it, or who did not even have ties or who had gone through a physical training system as happened traditionally. He invented a series of communication mechanisms that are videos, essentially magazines that can circulate quickly on social media and reach a whole audience geared to take these videos and understand the message of Global Jihad that this Sunni extremist group was proposing. .
In this particular case, it is interesting to see how ISIS has engineered the use of what are called low intensity terrorist attack tactics, but which produce enormous damage to the society in which they occur. This has involved telling them how to use a knife, which knife to get, how to use it, when to pull it out in front of a target, so it’s explained a lot like that, with video and with a magazine. The same thing happens with homemade bomb making, you see instructors assembling the bomb in a kitchen telling them “you don’t even need to go to a special place”.
It was also time for tutorials for the case of using trucks or vans. This is what Saipov did. His raids on his home in the town of Patterson revealed that he had adopted this modus operandi of receiving radicalization for violent extremism.
– Are you satisfied with the FBI investigation?
– I am satisfied in the sense that I have seen that the FBI officials and the heads of the federal prosecutor’s office for the Southern District of New York acted professionally, they are very good professionals, they know the subject and I can say that they have been engaged in case. I’m a lawyer and lawyers the only interest we defend is that of our clients. In this case, my only interest is that the rights of Ana Evans and her three children are duly protected and satisfied in the course of these lawsuits. In that sense, speaking as a lawyer, I would like to know and hope to know in the jury trial what happened in the town of Patterson. It is a problematic city, with problematic immigration. It is a welcoming place for a lot of moderate Islamic immigration, but there is a history that it is a problematic place with a very significant homicide rate in the United States, it is a violent place, and there are other problematic immigration groups. In other words, Patterson is a place that needs to be examined in terms of understanding what it meant to the forward. Why, before the attack, did he go to live in this city and what happened there? If in that place, as I believe, as my experience and what I have understood on the subject allows me to think, this virtual radicalization program must always end with physical contact, with a physical containment environment that finally allows a tactical guide to the attack and also emotional containment, particularly regarding what will happen to the family. Thus, the famous lone wolf theories are theories that may be applicable to some specific cases but not all. I don’t think they are wolves or loners.
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