World Trade Center Bombing (1993)

On February 26, 1993, during a typical Friday lunch hour, a truck bomb exploded in a basement-level parking garage under the World Trade Center in New York City, killing six and injuring more than 1,000. At the time, the bombing was considered the worst act of terrorism to have been perpetrated on U.S. soil. However, that bombing was overshadowed in 1995 by the Oklahoma City bombing, and then by the September 11, 2001, attacks.

The first World Trade Center bombing conspiracy began in the months before September 1, 1992, when two of the main conspirators, Ahmad Ajaj and Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, arrived in the United States from Pakistan. The Immigration and Naturalization Service detained Ajaj and confiscated his suitcase, which contained bombing manuals and anti-American propaganda. Yousef, traveling on an Iraqi passport bearing the name Abdel Basit Mahmoud, requested political asylum and was allowed into the country.

While Ajaj waited in jail, Yousef began to implement the bombing plot aimed at toppling the World Trade Center. On October 1, he moved into a rented room in the Little Egypt section of Jersey City, New Jersey, with another conspirator, Mohammad Salameh. Two weeks later, Salameh and another conspirator, Nidal Ayyad, opened a bank account at the National Westminster Bank.

They used money from this account to purchase the chemicals (urea and nitric acid) to make the bomb; these chemicals were stored in a locker rented by Salameh. On January 1, 1993, Salameh also rented a garage apartment in Jersey City, for use as a bomb factory. Over the next several weeks, the group assembled a 1,500-pound bomb. Salameh went on scouting missions to the World Trade Center, and Yousef called an associate in Dallas, Texas, Eyad Ismoil, who arrived in New York just days before the bombing.

On February 23, 1993, Salameh rented a van from a Ryder agency in Jersey City; he reported the van stolen two days later, in order to establish an alibi. The men purchased several tanks of hydrogen gas and loaded them onto the van to magnify the power of the explosion. In the early morning hours of February 26, Mahmud Abouhalima, another conspirator, filled the gas tanks of his car and the rented van. Yousef, [Page 411]Abouhalima, Salameh, and Ismoil then drove to lower Manhattan.

The van was left on the B-2 level of the parking garage under the Vista Hotel. At 12:18 P.M., the explosives detonated, and within two seconds blasted open a crater six stories deep and 200 feet wide. Abouhalima waited and watched from the classical music section of a nearby record store. Within hours, Salameh went to the Ryder agency to claim his $400 deposit for the “stolen” van; he was told to return later. Ismoil fled to Jordan. Yousef, the mastermind of the operation, was on an 11 P.M. plane to Karachi, Pakistan.

By the time Yousef left the country, authorities had already received more than 50 phone calls claiming responsibility for the bombing, and a handful of fake bomb threats at targets throughout New York City. With few leads, the initial suspects included the Serbian Liberation Forces, Libya's Muammar el-Qaddafi, or Iraq's Saddam Hussein. Hussein seemed the most likely candidate, as the bombing took place on the second anniversary of his defeat by U.S. forces in Kuwait.

Within two days of the bombing, the FBI got its first major break—a charred and mangled piece of the van's chassis that bore a vehicle identification number (VIN) was discovered in the debris. The VIN led authorities to the Ryder agency in Jersey City. On March 4, when Salameh returned to claim the refund on his deposit, the FBI arrested him. The rental agreement in Salameh's pocket bore traces of bomb residue as well as the address of the Jersey City apartment. At the apartment, authorities found another roommate, Abdul Rahman Yasin, who led them to the garage apartment bomb factory. Yasin left the country the next day, headed for Iraq. Abouhalima had also fled New York for Saudi Arabia. He was arrested in Egypt on March 10, the same day Ayyad was arrested in New York.

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