World Trade Center Bombing (1993)

On February 26, 1993, terrorists bombed New York City's World Trade Center, a prominent symbol of American financial power. It was composed of seven buildings covering sixteen acres and provided a workplace for some fifty thousand people and services for eighty thousand daily visitors. The complex was dominated by two one-hundred-ten-story towers, each nearly one-quarter mile high.

The explosion

The World Trade Center's underground parking facility, equipped for two thousand vehicles, was the stage for the bombing. There, at 12:18 p.m., a terrorist, working in a carefully planned scheme, lit four slow-burning fuses, igniting over one thousand pounds of urea (a nitrogen-containing chemical product usually used as fertilizer) mixed with one hundred five gallons of nitric acid and sixty gallons of sulfuric acid, all contained within a rented van.

The tremendous explosion that followed created a crater two-thousand feet square. Within minutes of the explosion thick, black smoke was drawn up the stairwells and elevator shafts of the two towers. Many people in the towers were forced onto the roofs by the choking, blinding smoke, and were rescued by helicopter. The explosion was so powerful that the cinder block walls of the parking structure turned to dust and a fourteen-thousand-pound steel beam snapped like a twig and was tossed fifty feet across the garage. The eleven-inch thick concrete floor that the van was parked on disintegrated, and a giant hole was torn through two more concrete ceilings above the bomb. Five people were killed and more than one thousand injured, a total many consider to be low considering how many tens of thousands of people were in the complex at the time.

The terrorists

The investigation's first solid lead on who was responsible for this terrorist act was a slim, dust-covered strip of metal that was found in the wreckage that revealed the vehicle identification number of the van that held the bomb. The number was quickly traced to a Ryder rental truck dealership in Jersey City, New Jersey. It had been rented to Mohammed A. Salameh (1967–), who was caught after he attempted to recover the $400 deposit he had left when he rented the van. When the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) searched his apartment, they found evidence that led them to a self-storage locker that Salameh had rented. It was stocked with bomb-making chemicals.

Other evidence led to the arrest of Ibraham Elgabrowny and Sayyid Nosair (who had previously been implicated in the murder of a rabbi), Mahmud Abouhalima, and Nidal Ayyad, a naturalized U.S. citizen with a degree in chemical engineering. Found among the belongings of the conspirators were photos of the Washington Monument , New York's Saks Fifth Avenue store, the Empire State Building, and the World Trade Center. Further investigation revealed that the person in charge of the bombing had been twenty-five-year-old Pakistani Ramzi Yousef (1967–).

Yousef had entered the United States in 1992. He made contact with Salameh and Ayyad and together they transferred nearly $100,000 to various bank accounts. The money was used to purchase the bomb-making chemicals that were stored in a small rented storage facility in Jersey City. The actual mixing of the chemicals and the assembly of the bomb, which took about a month, was completed at an apartment the terrorists had rented a few miles away.

Arrests and sentencing

While the other conspirators were quickly rounded up by the FBI, Abouhalima fled to Egypt but was soon captured by Egyptian police. After being interrogated and beaten for ten days, he was turned over to U.S. authorities in New York . Ayyad, the chemical engineer, was arrested when a letter claiming responsibility for the bombing was found on his computer. On March 4, 1994, Salameh, Ayyad, Abouhalima, and another suspect, Ahmad Ajaj, were found guilty of various crimes, including conspiracy, assault, and explosives charges. Ajaj was a Palestinian trained in guerilla warfare and who had assisted Yousef. Although he had been in prison for immigration fraud when the bomb exploded, he aided in its construction via encoded messages over the prison telephone. Each of the terrorists was sentenced to a term in prison of two-hundred forty years. Nosair and Elgabrowny were found not guilty of being conspirators in the Trade Center bombing but Nosair was subsequently convicted of a 1990 slaying.

Yousef fled the United States. In early 1995, after eluding police on three continents, he was arrested in Islamabad, Pakistan. He was turned over to the FBI and returned to the United States to stand trial. His uncle, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (c. 1964–), a member of the terrorist group al-Qaeda , was believed to have financed the bombing. The blind Egyptian cleric Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman (1938–) a militant (war-like) Islamist who presided at a mosque in Jersey City, was suspected of being the spiritual leader and co-conspirator of the terrorist gang. Rahman was never charged in the World Trade Center bombing, but in late 1995 he and nine of his followers were convicted of conspiring to carry out bombings, assassinations, and other terrorist activities. Rahman was sentenced to life in prison.

There had been few terrorist attacks on U.S. soil prior to this first bombing of the World Trade Center. The attack shocked Americans, especially because no evidence or acknowledgment linked it to a particular American action or policy. The bombing, which in many ways ushered in the era of terrorist threats to come, significantly changed the way American citizens felt about their security.