Ramzi Yousef
Ramzi Ahmed Yousef is a Pakistani convicted terrorist who was one of the main perpetrators and the mastermind behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the bombing of Philippine Airlines Flight 434; he was also a co-conspirator in the Bojinka plot. In 1995, he was arrested by the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence and U.S. Diplomatic Security Service at a guest house in Islamabad, Pakistan, while trying to set a bomb in a doll, then extradited to the United States.
Yousef was tried in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York along with two co-conspirators and was convicted of planning the Bojinka plot. He received two life sentences plus 240 years for his part in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and Bojinka plot.
Yousef's maternal uncle is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, with whom he allegedly planned the Bojinka plot. Mohammed is a senior al-Qaeda member accused of being the principal architect of the September 11 attacks in 2001. Yousef is serving his life sentences at ADX Florence, located near Florence, Colorado. He shared a cell block that is commonly referred to as "Bombers' Row" with Terry Nichols, Eric Rudolph, and Ted Kaczynski, before the latter's transfer in late 2021. In 2007, media reports suggested Yousef converted to Christianity after claiming he found Jesus; however, his lawyer, Bernard V. Kleinman, had disputed this, stating Yousef "made it clear he has never had any interest in doing that".
Early life
The name "Ramzi Ahmed Yousef" is a pseudonym. Yousef's real name is assumed to be Abdul Basit Mahmoud Abdul Karim. He was born on 27 April 1968, in Kuwait to a Baloch family. His father is believed to be Mohammed Abdul Karim from Balochistan, Pakistan. His mother is believed to be the sister of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.In 1986, he enrolled at Swansea Institute in Wales, where he studied electrical engineering, graduating four years later. He also studied at the Oxford College of Further Education to improve his English.
Yousef left the United Kingdom after completing his studies and returned to Pakistan. He began to learn bomb making in a terrorist training camp in Peshawar, before traveling to the United States in 1992.
1993 World Trade Center bombing
The World Trade Center bombing was a terrorist attack that occurred on 26 February 1993, when a car bomb was detonated below Tower One of the World Trade Center in New York City, New York. The 1,500 lb urea nitrate-hydrogen gas enhanced device was intended to knock the North Tower into the South Tower, to bring both towers down and kill thousands of people. It failed to do so, but killed six civilians and injured 1,042, including 919 civilians, 88 firefighters, and 35 police officers.Ramzi Yousef sent a letter to The New York Times after the bombing that expressed his motive:
We are, the fifth battalion in the Liberation Army, declare our responsibility for the explosion on the mentioned building. This action was done in response for the American political, economical, and military support to Israel, the state of terrorism, and to the rest of the dictator countries in the region.
If our demands are not met, all of our functional groups in the army will continue to execute our missions against the military and civilian targets in and out the United States. For your own information, our army has more than hundred and fifty suicidal soldiers ready to go ahead. The terrorism that Israel practices must be faced with a similar one. The dictatorship and terrorism that some countries are practicing against their own people must also be faced with terrorism.
The American people must know, that their civilians who got killed are not better than those who are getting killed by the American weapons and support.
The American people are responsible for the actions of their government and they must question all of the crimes that their government is committing against other people. Or they — Americans — will be the targets of our operations that could diminish them.
Arrival in United States
On 1 September 1992, Yousef entered the United States with an Iraqi passport of disputed authenticity. His companion, Ahmed Ajaj, carried multiple immigration documents, among which was a crudely falsified Swedish passport. Providing a smokescreen to facilitate Yousef's entry, Ajaj was arrested on the spot when immigration officials found bomb manuals, videotapes of suicide car bombers, and a cheat sheet on how to lie to U.S. immigration inspectors in his luggage. Directors of the American Counter-Terrorism program later tied the travel arrangements to a phone call from Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, an Egyptian militant Muslim preacher, to the Pakistani telephone number 810604.Yousef was held for 72 hours and repeatedly interrogated, but INS holding cells were overcrowded. Yousef, requesting political asylum, was given a hearing date of 9 November 1992. He told Jersey City Police that he was Abdul Basit Mahmoud Abdul Karim, a Pakistani national born and brought up in Kuwait, and that he had lost his passport. On December 31, 1992, the Pakistani Consulate in New York issued a temporary passport to Abdul Basit Mahmud Abdul Karim.
Yousef traveled around New York and New Jersey, during which time he made calls to Abdel-Rahman via cell phone. Between 3 December and 27 December 1992, he made conference calls to key numbers in Balochistan, Pakistan.
Ajaj never reclaimed the manuals and tapes, which remained at the New York office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation after Judge Reena Raggi had ordered the materials released in December 1992.
Assembling the bomb
Yousef, aided by Mohammed A. Salameh and Mahmud Abouhalima, began assembling the urea nitrate-fuel oil device in his Pamrapo Avenue home in Jersey City ready for delivery to the WTC on 26 February 1993. He ordered chemicals from his hospital room when he had been injured in a car crash, one of three accidents caused by Salameh in late 1992 and early in 1993.Speaking in code by phone on 29 December 1992, Ajaj told Yousef that he had won release of the bomb manuals but warned Yousef that picking them up might jeopardize his "business". On one book carried by Ajaj in 1992 was a word translated by the FBI as meaning "the basic rule." It was later found to be al Qaeda – meaning "the base."
During a CBS 60 Minutes interview in 2002, co-conspirator Abdul Rahman Yasin said that Yousef originally wanted to bomb Jewish neighborhoods in New York City. Yasin added that after touring Crown Heights and Williamsburg, Yousef had changed his mind. Yasin alleged that Yousef was educated in bomb-making at a training camp in Peshawar, Pakistan.
Explosion and aftermath
Yousef rented a Ryder van and on 26 February 1993, loaded it with powerful explosives. He packed four cardboard boxes into the back of the van, each containing a mixture of paper bags, newspapers, urea, and nitric acid; next to them he placed three red metal cylinders of compressed hydrogen. Four large containers of nitroglycerin were loaded into the center of the van with Atlas Rockmaster blasting caps connected to each.The van was driven into the garage of the World Trade Center, where it exploded. Using his Pakistani passport, Yousef escaped from the United States hours later. It is believed that he fled to Iraq and then Pakistan. As a result of the bombing, the FBI added Yousef as the 436th person on its Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list on 21 April 1993.
1993 Benazir Bhutto assassination attempt
After returning to Pakistan in February 1993, Yousef went into hiding. That summer, he allegedly took up a contract to assassinate the prime minister of Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto, which was initiated by members of Sipah-e-Sahaba. The plot failed when Yousef and Abdul Hakim Murad were interrupted by police outside Bhutto's residence. Yousef decided to abort the bombing and it blew up as he was trying to recover the device. He escaped and went into hiding during the investigation.1994 Imam Reza shrine bombing
Bojinka plot
After the Iranian shrine bombing, Yousef soon began planning the Bojinka plot. It included plans to assassinate Pope John Paul II while he visited the Philippines, and to plant bombs inside several United and Delta Air Lines flights out of Bangkok. On this plot, he allegedly worked with his maternal uncle, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.1994 Philippine Airlines Flight 434 bombing
On 11 December 1994, Yousef conducted a trial run of the plan by boarding Philippine Airlines Flight 434 from Manila to Tokyo, Japan, with a stopover in Cebu. An accomplished forger, Yousef created a counterfeit Italian passport with the identity Armaldo Forlani, an alteration of the name of the Italian prime minister Arnaldo Forlani, and booked the flight's Manila-Cebu leg using the said name.Yousef assembled a bomb in the lavatory, set the timer to detonate four hours later, and placed it in the life vest pouch under seat 26K on the right-hand side of the fuselage. The cabin crew of this leg, one of whom he asked permission to move to seat 26K, Maria Delacruz, had noticed that Yousef kept switching seats during the course of the flight, but did not warn the new cabin crew boarding at Cebu of his behavior, and only revealed about it to the investigators. Yousef and 25 other passengers left the plane at Cebu, where 256 passengers and a new cabin crew boarded for the trip to Tokyo. Many passengers were Japanese people; some were coworkers traveling as part of a tour group. Airport congestion delayed the departure of Flight 434 from Cebu for 38 minutes. All of the passengers had boarded by 8:30 a.m., with the bomb having been planted around two hours earlier. PAL 434 was cleared for takeoff at 8:38 a.m.
At 11:43 a.m., about an hour and a half from Tokyo, the bomb exploded while Flight 434 cruised on autopilot above the Japanese island of Minami Daitō. The explosion killed 24-year-old Haruki Ikegami, a Japanese businessman occupying the seat where the bomb was placed. Ten passengers sitting in the seats in front of and behind Ikegami were also injured while one needed urgent medical care. The explosion tore out a two square-foot portion of the cabin floor into the cargo hold but leaving the fuselage of the plane intact. The airplane was spared from a deadly fiery explosion as the seat where the bomb was planted, 26K, was two rows away from the central fuel tank. The rapid expansion of energy from the bomb caused the plane to expand vertically slightly, damaging cables to the steering and aileron controls. The bomb's orientation caused the energy to be mostly absorbed by Ikegami; he was killed but the other passengers and the plane were not catastrophically damaged.
The cockpit crew improvised to manipulate the plane's speed and direction by varying the engines' throttle settings. Captain Eduardo Reyes made an emergency landing at Okinawa's Naha Airport, saving 272 passengers and 20 crew. The aircraft became a crime scene under Japanese law; bomb fragments found in and around the blast zone, as well as Ikegami's remains, provided clues pointing investigators back to Manila.