NEW YORK (EJP)—Ariel Erlij, an Argentinian Jew, was among the eight people killed in the terrorist truck-ramming attack in Manhattan on Tuesday afternoon.
Erlij, a 48-year-old businessman from the city of Rosaria, was accompanying other Argentinian tourists celebrating the 30th anniversary of their high school graduation. Four of them were also killed in the attack.
The truck rammed into a crowd on a bike path in south east of Manhattan, alongside Hudson river, in what New York Mayor Bill de Blasio called “an act of terror.”
The 29-year-old man who drove the rented pickup truck was shot in the abdomen by police and arrested after he crashed the truck into a school bus and fled his vehicle. The suspect was identified as an Uzbekistan-born immigrant who moved to the US in 2010.
Police said Saipov spent weeks planning an attack in the name of the Islamic State group.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said that Saipov appears to have been inspired by “ISIS and radical Islamic tactics,” but that investigators “have no evidence yet of associations or continuing plot or associated plots, and our only evidence to date is that this was an isolated incident that he himself performed.”