)
The filings do not reveal the contents of the conversations or whether the man, Sayfullo Saipov, 30, was overheard making threats or talking about an impending attack. Still, the filings suggested that Saipov was in touch with other people under FBI surveillance.
The attack on Halloween last year was the deadliest terrorist attack in New York since Sept. 11, 2001. Saipov is accused of driving a pickup truck down a bike path along the Hudson River, killing eight people and injuring others. He then crashed into a school bus, ran down the highway waving a pellet gun and a paintball gun and shouted “God is great” in Arabic.
Saipov’s lawyers said in court papers that they had received a trove of materials from the government concerning “surreptitious FBI surveillance of Mr. Saipov’s communications.” Those materials included “numerous audio recordings of conversations between Mr. Saipov and various targets of FBI surveillance,” along with about 1,000 pages of translated summaries of the calls, which were largely in Uzbek, the lawyers said.
The lawyers’ filing left open the possibility that Saipov was not the actual target of FBI surveillance and might have been overheard in conversations with others whom the FBI had interest in.
)
)
)
Saipov was apprehended after a police officer shot him in the abdomen and was charged with eight counts of murder and other crimes. Two FBI agents questioned him through the night as he recovered in the intensive care unit at Bellevue Hospital Center.
Saipov told the agents he had been inspired to carry out the attack by Islamic State videos that he had watched on his phone, according to a criminal complaint. He also said he began planning the attack about a year earlier and used a truck to inflict maximum damage. He told the agents “he felt good about what he had done,” the complaint said.
The U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan has not yet responded to the defense’s filings. That office, the FBI and Saipov’s federal public defenders all declined to comment on the defense’s new filings.
Terrorism experts said the existence of such intercepted telephone calls — even where their content and significance are unknown — underscored the challenge for law enforcement in predicting lone-wolf attacks. Little is known about Saipov’s comments on the calls.
“It’s possible that the picture they paint of Saipov is just not that alarming,” said Bobby Chesney, a professor at the University of Texas School of Law and co-founder of Lawfare, a national security blog. “But it could turn out otherwise, and that would raise serious questions about why they didn’t make him a priority, including the possibility of arresting him if grounds existed to do so.”
Karen J. Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security at Fordham University School of Law, said, “The question it raises in my mind is no matter how much surveillance there is, even right up to the eve of an attack, we still have not figured out exactly what it is that we’re looking for as a sign of immediate danger beyond ‘I have a gun in my pocket’ or ‘a bomb strapped to my chest.'”
Saipov’s lawyers revealed the existence of the covert recordings as part of a request to the judge, Vernon S. Broderick, to suppress Saipov’s statements after his arrest. They said prosecutors have told the defense that they do not intend to use the intercepted conversations during Saipov’s trial or any potential death-penalty phase. But in reviewing the FBI’s summaries of Saipov’s questioning, his lawyers wrote, “it is clear they interrogated Mr. Saipov about matters and contacts that overlap” with the covert surveillance of his communications.
The federal government has said it will seek the death penalty for Saipov if he is convicted at his trial, scheduled for next October in U.S. District Court in Manhattan. Saipov was denounced immediately after the attack by President Donald Trump, who wrote on Twitter that he “should get the death penalty.”
Saipov’s lawyers have asked Broderick to block the government from seeking capital punishment, arguing the comments posted on Twitter and other statements by Trump had politicized the decision.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.