Sayfullo Saipov, a 35-year-old Uzbek who killed eight people in New York in 2017 posing as Daesh, was sentenced to life imprisonment on Monday, thus escaping the death penalty required by the Ministry of Justice.
After several days of deliberation, the 12-person jury told the Manhattan federal court that it had not reached a unanimous decision on the death penalty, as required by law, prosecutors told AFP.
As a result, the defendant was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, which was the only other option for the jury.
Currently, a death sentence could not have been carried out, as the US Department of Justice decided in 2021 on a moratorium on federal executions.
But the ministry’s position in this case had disappointed human rights associations, which had seen it as a denial of Joe Biden’s campaign commitment to abolish capital punishment at the federal level.
The biggest attack since 9/11
On October 31, 2017, on Halloween, Sayfullo Saipov, who has lived in the United States since 2010, drove a pickup truck into passersby on a bike path along the Hudson River in Manhattan. The attack left eight dead, including five Argentines visiting New York, and a Belgian, as well as numerous injuries, the highest number for an attack in the city since the attacks of September 11, 2001.
L’homme avait revendiqué son acte au nom de Daesh, un an après l’attaque menée par un Tunisien à bord d’un camion à Nice, qui avait fait 86 morts et plus de 400 blessés le 14 juillet, jour de la fete nationale French.
On January 26, Sayfullo Saipov was convicted of aggravated murder and “supporting a terrorist group” by a jury in Manhattan federal court.
The same 12-person jury had been sitting since February 13 for a second trial on the sentence.
During the hearings, relatives of the victims killed or injured who suffered the aftermath of the attack gave testimony that was often moving and heartbreaking.
Source: BFM TV
