Six people died when a truck that was hiding 680 kg of explosives it exploded through the air in a basement of the World Trade Center at 12:17 noon. It was near the North Tower garage and, despite its seriousness, it was considered a failed attack. However, it was a notice of the real attack that would occur on September 11, 2001.
It happened on February 26, 1993 and the original plan was for the explosives to set off a chain reaction that would bring down both the North Tower and the South Tower of the World Trade Center.
The act terrorist drilled three levels of reinforced concrete and dug a 30-meter-deep hole in the garage floor. There were 1,042 people injured and around 50,000 had to be evacuated.
Several hundred were trapped in the rubble of offices and had to be rescued by the New York Fire Department.
World Trade Center attack
Despite its seriousness, at that time the event was not given the value it would acquire later, as a global alert against terrorism that would attack New York on September 11, 2001When the Twin Towers fell.
The explosion in the garage World Trade Center It would be the prelude to the four terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the first jihadist attack inside the United States.
The myopia of the shock made the first investigators think that the drug trafficker was behind the explosion. Pablo Escobar, whom at that time the US justice system wanted to extradite from Colombia to be tried by a local court.
In any case, the expertise of the FBI They continued and the picture cleared up. The first clue found was the license plate of the vehicle-bombwhich had been denounced as stolen the same day of the attack.
USA, terrorism and Al Qaeda
It was determined that the terrorist attack had been planned by the group Al Qaeda of Afghanistan and that the main ideologue was Khaled Shaikh Mohammeduncle of Ramzi Yousef, one of the main necessary participants.
Special agents of the United States Diplomatic Security Service caught Ramzi Yousef two years later, in 1995, in a hideout of the Al Qaeda group, in Islamabad, capital of Pakistan. He was extradited and tried in the United States.
The CIA and Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence arrested his uncle, Khaled Shaikh Mohammedin the city of Rawalpindi, Pakistan, on March 1, 2003.
Was imprisoned in a secret CIA prison until 2006 and then he was transferred to Guantanamo. In 2007, he confessed to having been the ideologue and financier of the 1993 World Trade Center attack and the September 11, 2001but also of the Bali bombings of 2002 and various other failed terrorist attempts.
World Trade Center and other attacks
Anyway, Ramzi Yousef did not act alone. Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, El Sayyid Nosair, Mahmud Abouhalima, Mohammad Salameh, Nidal Ayyad, Ahmad Ajaj y Abdul Rahman Yasin They cooperated with him.
Ramzi Yousef He was also found guilty of exploding a bomb mid-flight on Philippine Airlines aircraft 434, which came from Manila and was headed to Tokyo, with a stopover in the Philippine city of Cebu.
Yousef, who finished assembling the bomb in the plane’s cabin bathroom, hid it in the seat he occupied, 26K, and got off the plane during the stopover in Cebu.
A Japanese sewing machine manufacturer took the vacated seat and was killed in the explosion. Incredibly, the pilots managed to make an emergency landing.
Fugitive from the attack on the World Trade Center
The son of a Pakistani woman and a Palestinian father, Yousef was born in 1968 and raised in Kuwait.
Yousef had been received from electrical engineer at Swansea Institute of Wales, and then also went through the Oxford College of Higher Education. He then returned to Pakistan and learned to make bombs at a terrorist training camp in Peshawar.
On his travels he had declared so many different identities using false passports that his nationality was never entirely clear.
In 1992, Yousef agreed to travel to the United States to participate in the Operation Bojinka, a large-scale terrorist project that included killing Pope John Paul II, shooting down 11 planes linking Asia and the United States, and crashing a plane into the CIA building in Langley, Virginia.
In January 1998, he was sentenced to 240 years in prison and allowed only a few visits from immediate family. The main witness against him was an FBI agent who testified that, during the trip extradition to USAthe defendant confessed that he intended to kill more than 250,000 Americans with the Operation Bojinka attacks.
US$ 5 million for the fugitive
In March 1994 four other men were found guilty of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing: Abouhalima, Ajaj, Ayyad and Salameh. The charges included conspiracy, explosive destruction of property and interstate transfer of explosives. In 1997, Eyad Ismoil, the driver of the truck that transported the bombs to the World Trade Center garage, was also sentenced to perpetua.
Abdul Rahman Yasinwho helped make the bombs of the February 26, 1993was the only participant who managed to escape and take refuge in Iraq.
In 1994, he was captured but collaborated with Iraqi justice and was considered a protected witness; he regained his freedom.
The program Rewards for Jutice, of the United States Department of Justice offers up to US$ 5 million who can give a clue to help find it.
You may also like
Source link
