World Trade Center bombing |
The World Trade Center bombing refers to the February 26,
1993 attack in the garage of the New
York City World Trade Center. For information on the
2001 attack, see: September 11, 2001 attacks.
Before the attacks
A man named Ramzi Yousef entered the United States with a false Iraqi passport in 1992. Police found instructions on making a bomb in Yousef's partner's luggage. The name Abu Barra, which was an
alias of Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, appeared in the
manuals.
Therefore, his partner was arrested on the spot for his false passport and his bomb-making instructions. At the time, INS holding cells were overcrowded, so the authorities told Yousef to come back in one month. Yousef
set up residence in Jersey City, New Jersey and
travelled around New York and New
Jersey and called Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, a
controversial Muslim preacher, via cell phone. Yousef got the manuals back from his
partner. He got conspirators and tried obtaining mixing chemicals to make a bomb. After a hospital stay from a car accident,
Yousef got back the manuals from his car, which was in a police impound.
El Sayyid Nosair, who was one of Sheikh Rahman's men and who
would later be convicted for the bombing, was arrested in 1991 for the murder of rabbi Meir Kahane. A man named Mahmud Abouhalima, who was
later convicted in the bombing, told a man named Wadih el Hage to buy the
assault rifle used in the Kahane shooting. Nosair was acquitted of murder but convicted
of gun charges. There were dozens of bomb-making manuals and documents related to terrorist plots found in the apartment, but
they had not been translated into the English language from the
Arabic language.
Yousef stole or rented a Ryder van that was to be used in the attacks. If Yousef had
had more funds, he would have used a truck bomb. The van that he used had 8 m³ (295 ft³) of
space, which would hold up to 1,000 kg of explosives. However, the van was not filled to
capacity.
The bomb
Yousef's complex 600 kilogram bomb was made of urea pellets, nitroglycerin, sulfuric
acid, aluminum azide,
magnesium azide, and
bottled hydrogen. He added sodium cyanide to the mix as the vapors could go through the ventilation shafts and elevators of the towers.
The van that Yousef used had four 6 m (20 ft) long fuses, all covered in surgical tubing. Yousef calculated that the fuse would
trigger the bomb in twelve minutes after he would use a cheap cigarette lighter
to light the fuse.
He wanted to prevent smoke from escaping the towers, therefore, catching the public eye by poisoning people inside. He foresaw
Tower One collapsing onto Tower Two after the blast would occur.
The attack
On February 26, 1993, a car bomb was
planted by the Islamist terrorists
in the underground garage below Tower One. The bomb's fuses burnt at a rate of one inch per two and one half seconds (1 cm/s).
The men spent 300 United States dollars for the materials
to build the bomb.
The bomb exploded in the underground garage at 12:17 P.M., opening a 30 meter wide
hole through 4 sublevels of concrete. The bomb generated a pressure of more than 1
GPa. The detonation velocity of this bomb was about 4.5 km/s (15,000 ft/s). The cyanide gas that Yousef put in the bomb burnt up in the explosion.
Six people were killed. At least 1,040 others were injured. However, the towers were not destroyed as Yousef envisioned.
Yousef escaped to Pakistan several hours later.
The bomb cut off the center's main electrical power line, and all
telephone service for New York City. The bomb caused smoke to rise up to
the 93rd floor of both towers, and cut off the towers' four stairwells and emergency lighting system.
Despite its relatively low death toll, the bombing shocked the American public. Only once before the 1993 attack that the
FBI recorded had a bomb of that force had been used. The FBI has recorded a total of about
73,000 explosions.
Yousef's friends reported the van stolen in an attempt to slow investigators down.
List of deceased
- John DiGiovanni, Valley Stream, New York
- Robert Kirkpatrick, Suffern, New York
- Steve Knapp, Manhattan, New York, New York
- Monica Smith, Seaford, New York
- William Macko, Bayonne, New Jersey
- Wilfredo Mercado, Brooklyn, New York, New York.
After the attacks
On March 4, 1993 authorities announced the
capture of one of the suspected bombing conspirators Mohammad Salameh and exactly one year later four terrorists were convicted for their roles in the
bombing.
The capture of Salameh led authorities to Yousef's apartment, where they found bomb-making materials and a business card from
Mohammed Jamal Khalifa.
Khalifa was arrested in relation to the crime in December 14, 1994, and was deported to Jordan by the INS in May 5, 1995.
Jamal was acquitted by a Jordanian court and now lives as a free man in Saudi
Arabia.
In 1995, militant Islamist Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman
and nine others were convicted of conspiracy charges to bomb several New York
City landmarks (see New York City
landmark bomb plot), and in 1998, Ramzi Yousef, believed to have been
the mastermind, was convicted of "seditious conspiracy" to bomb the towers - no one was ever convicted for the actual bombing.
Another man named Eyad Ismail was tried alongside Yousef for the bombing.
Six militant Islamist conspirators were convicted of the crime in 1997 and 1998 and given prison sentences of a maximum of 240 years each. The main reason that the World
Trade Center did not collapse was due to the towers' strength and the fact that Yousef did not have enough money to build a more
powerful bomb.
Another conspirator in the plot was Nidal Ayyad.
A granite memorial to the six victims of the bombing was erected between the Twin Towers, directly above the site of the
explosion. This granite memorial erected in memory of the first attack was obliterated during the destruction of the towers in
2001.
FBI foreknowledge
In the course of the trial it was revealed that the FBI had an informant, an Egyptian man named Emad Salem, who was involved with the bombing
conspiracy. Salem claims to have informed the FBI of the plot to bomb the towers as early as February 6, 1992, information he was privy to possibly because he himself
initiated the plot. Salem's role as informant allowed the FBI to quickly pinpoint the conspirators out of the hundreds of
possible suspects.
Salem asserts that the original plan was to have the plotters build the bomb using a harmless powder instead of actual
explosive, but that an FBI supervisor decided that a real bomb should be constructed instead. He substantiates his claims with
hundreds of hours of secretly-recorded conversations with his FBI handlers, made during discussions held after the bombings.
Salem says he wished to complain to FBI headquarters in Washington about the failure to prevent the bombing despite
foreknowledge, but was dissuaded from doing so by the New York FBI office.
The FBI has not explicitly denied Salem's account.
See also
Further reading
The New Jackals
by Simon Reeve
Reference
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