Five longtime friends visiting from Argentina were among the eight people killed Tuesday when a driver in a rental truck deliberately drove down a scenic bike path along Manhattan’s West Side.
The five Argentines were celebrating the 30th anniversary of their high school graduation, Argentina’s minister of foreign affairs said in a statement on Twitter. A sixth person who died was Belgian, Belgium’s deputy prime minister and foreign affairs minister announced on social media.
In a press conference on Wednesday, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said the six foreigners would be remembered as locals.
“Six of them came from other nations because they saw New York as a special place to be, and we now and forever will consider them New Yorkers,” he said. “They shared this tragedy with us. We will remember them as New Yorkers.”
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The Argentines were identified as Hernán Diego Mendoza, Diego Enrique Angelini, Alejandro Damián Pagnucco, Ariel Erlij and Hernán Ferruchi. A sixth Argentine, Martin Ludovico Marro, was injured and is recovering in the hospital, the foreign minister said.
Their alma mater, La Comunidad Educativa del Instituto Politécnico in Rosario, in central Argentina, confirmed on Facebook that the victims graduated in 1987 and expressed “sincere condolences.”
According to Argentine newspaper Clarín, the group had planned on celebrating in New York and then reuniting in Rosario with more alums who couldn’t make the trip.
Little else is known about the victims in Tuesday’s terror attack, the deadliest in New York City since Sept. 11, 2001.
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The Belgian’s name was not made public. Belgium’s deputy prime minister and foreign affairs minister Didier Reynders expressed condolences to the victim’s family and friends and tweeted in French that three other Belgians had been hurt and were undergoing surgery.
The suspect in the attack, Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov, 29, is an Uzbekistan native who came to the U.S. in 2010, officials said. Authorities say he mowed over several people in the bike path and then crashed into a school bus and shouted “Allahu Akbar,” Arabic for “God is great,” before he was shot and wounded by police.
De Blasio called the attack “an act of terror” Tuesday and said it was “aimed at innocent civilians, aimed at people going about their lives who had no idea what was about to hit them.”
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“We know that this action was intended to break our spirit,” the mayor said. “But we also know that New Yorkers are strong, New Yorkers are resilient, and our spirit will never be moved by an act of violence, an act meant to intimidate us.”