5 Argentine citizens killed in New York attack — official

Buenos Aires, Argentina —Five Argentine citizens were killed and another injured Tuesday in the New York truck attack that killed a total of eight people, the Foreign Ministry said.

The Argentine victims were from the city of Rosario, and were visiting New York for a school reunion.

Eleven others were seriously hurt when the truck driver struck in broad daylight just blocks from the 9/11 Memorial, on the West Side of Lower Manhattan, close to schools as children and their parents geared up to celebrate Halloween.

“The Argentine government expresses its most sincere condolences for the deaths of Argentine nationals Hernan Diego Mendoza, Diego Enrique Angelini, Alejandro Damian Pagnucco, Ariel Erlij and Hernan Ferruchi, in the dramatic terrorist attack this afternoon in New York,” a ministry statement said.

The injured man was named as Martin Ludovico Marro, who was being treated at Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan with non-life-threatening injuries, it added.

An investigator walks past a crashed pickup truck following an incident in New York on October 31, 2017. A pickup driver killed eight people in New York on Tuesday, mowing down cyclists and pedestrians, before striking a school bus in what officials branded a “cowardly act of terror.” Eleven others were seriously injured in the broad daylight assault and first deadly terror-related attack in America’s financial and entertainment capital since the September 11, 2001 Al-Qaeda hijackings brought down the Twin Towers.
/ AFP PHOTO / Don EMMERT