Ramzi Yousef

Ramzi Yousef (رمزي يوسف, Ramzī Yūsuf; born May 20, 1967) was one of the main perpetrators of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and a co-conspirator in the Bojinka plot. In 1995, he was arrested at a guest house in Islamabad, Pakistan, by the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and U.S. Diplomatic Security Service,  then extradited to the United States.

He 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. Yousef stated: "Yes, I am a terrorist, and proud of it as long as it is against the U.S. government and against Israel, because you are more than terrorists; you are the one who invented terrorism and using it every day. You are butchers, liars and hypocrites." He was sentenced to two life sentences 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 sentence at a Supermax prison located in Florence, Colorado. His life and actions are recounted in the true crime biography Before 9/11.

Early life and education
Yousef was born in Kuwait to parents who were both from Pakistan. His father is Mohammed Abdul Karim from Balochistan, Pakistan. His mother is believed to be the sister of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

When his family returned to Pakistan in the mid-1980s, Yousef was sent to the United Kingdom for education. 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 occurred on February 26, 1993, when a car bomb was detonated below Tower One of the World Trade Center in New York City. The 1,500 lb (680 kg) urea nitrate-hydrogen gas enhanced device was intended to knock the North Tower (Tower One) into the South Tower (Tower Two), to bring both towers down and kill thousands of people. It failed to do so but killed six people and injured 1,042.

Ramzi Yousef sent a letter to The New York Times after the bombing which expressed his motive: "'We 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.' He later stated that he had hoped to kill 250,000 Americans to show them the exact pain they had caused to the Japanese in the Atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.'"

Arrival in United States
On September 1, 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, a 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 November 9, 1992. He told Jersey City Police that he was Abdul Basit Mahmud 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 (SAAG 484 2002).

Yousef travelled around New York and New Jersey, during which time he made calls to Abdel-Rahman via cell phone. Between December 3 and December 27, 1992, he made conference calls to key numbers in Balochistan, Pakistan (SAAG 484 2002).

Ajaj never reclaimed the manuals and tapes, which remained at the FBI's New York Office after Judge Reena Raggi had ordered the materials released in December 1992. (Lance 2004 pp 51, 101 )

Assembling the bomb
Yousef, aided by Mohammed Salameh and Mahmud Abouhalima, began assembling the 1500 lb urea nitrate-fuel oil device in his Pamrapo Avenue home in Jersey City ready for delivery to the WTC on February 26, 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 December 29, 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" (Lance 2004 p 32 ).

During a 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 February 26, 1993, loaded it with 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 (Reeve (1999), pp 154 ).

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 April 21, 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.

1993 Iranian shrine bombing
After a failed attempt to bomb the Israeli embassy in Bangkok, Thailand, Yousef moved back to Pakistan, where he plotted a bombing inside Iran. Yousef had a deep hatred of Shiite Muslims, and most Iranians are Shiites. On June 20, 1994, a Shiite holy day, Yousef bombed the Imam Reza shrine in Mashhad, Iran, one of the most important Shiite shrines. The attack killed 26 people and injured over 200. Yousef was working with his younger brother, Abdul Muneem, and his father, who was arrested and detained in Iran. While Yousef generally worked in concert with - or by orders from - Osama bin Laden, his Mashhad bombing ran counter to bin Laden's efforts that year to work with the Iranian-influenced Hezbollah militant group.

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.

Philippine Airlines Flight 434
On December 11, 1994, Yousef conducted a trial run of the plan by boarding a Philippine Airlines Boeing 747 designated as PAL434 from Manila to Tokyo, Japan, with a stopover in the Philippine city of Cebu. His identity for the flight was that of an Italian man named Armaldo Forlani. The cabin crew for this leg of the flight later told investigators that Yousef changed seats several times during the relatively short flight, with his last seat change coming after a return from the lavatory.

Yousef assembled a bomb in the lavatory, set the timer to detonate four hours later, and put it in the lifejacket pocket under seat 26K on the right-hand side of the fuselage. The domestic flight attendant Maria Delacruz had noticed that Yousef kept switching seats during the course of the Manila to Cebu flight, but did not warn the new cabin crew boarding at Cebu of his behavior. 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 cleared for takeoff at 8:48 a.m.

Two hours before arrival at Tokyo, at 11:43 am, the bomb exploded while Flight 434 cruised on autopilot 31000 ft above the Japanese island of Minamidaitō (near Okinawa Island and approximately 260 miles (420 km) southwest of Tokyo). The explosion ripped in half the body of 24-year old Haruki Ikegami (池上 春樹), a Japanese businessman occupying seat 26K,. Ten passengers sitting in the seats in front of and behind Ikegami were also injured. One needed urgent medical care. The bomb tore out a two square-foot (0.2 m2) portion of the cabin floor, revealing the cargo hold underneath, but leaving the fuselage of the plane intact. 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 spared from catastrophic damage.

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 plane became a crime scene; bomb fragments found in and around the blast zone, as well as the lower half of Ikegami's body, provided clues pointing investigators back to Manila.

Discovery by police
After this success, Yousef returned to Manila, where he began preparing at least a dozen bombs, each with a larger weight of explosive materials. Weeks before his planned attacks, a fire started in his Manila flat, forcing him to flee the room, leaving everything behind. The fire made the apartment staff suspicious, and soon police, led by Aida Fariscal, raided the flat and uncovered the plot. A Philippine National Police raid in another Manila apartment revealed related evidence that Abdul Murad, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and Yousef had drawn up plans for flying an airplane into the CIA headquarters. The information was passed on to the FAA, who warned individual airlines.

1995 U.S. airliner bombing attempt
Despite the international manhunt, Yousef escaped from Manila to Pakistan. On January 31, 1995, he flew from Pakistan to Thailand and met with an associate Istaique Parker. Yousef told Parker to check two suitcases filled with bombs, one on a Delta Air Lines flight and another on a United Airlines flight. Both bombs were timed to blow up over populated areas of the U.S. Parker spent much of the day at the airport, but was reportedly too scared to approach the airlines with the suitcases. Finally, Parker returned to Yousef's hotel and lied that employees at the airline cargo sections were asking for passports and fingerprints, making it too risky to go ahead with the plan.

Yousef, wanting to get the bombs on a plane bound for the U.S., called a friend with diplomatic immunity in Qatar who was willing to take the suitcases to London and check them on a flight to the U.S. The plan was that they would explode mid-flight and destroy the plane. Yousef planned to use the friend's diplomatic immunity to ensure the suitcases would be loaded on the plane. According to Simon Reeve's book The New Jackals, the name of this friend has not been revealed, but his father is said to be a very senior politician and leading member of the establishment in Qatar (at the time, Yousef's maternal uncle, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was living in Qatar as the guest of a Qatari cabinet official). But, there was a problem and the suitcases were not checked in. Yousef and Parker returned to Pakistan on February 2, 1995.(Reeve (1999), pp 98–100 )

Arrest, conviction and prison life
Following a tip-off from Istaique Parker, on February 7, 1995, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and U.S. Diplomatic Security Service officers, including Bill Miller and Jeff Riner, raided room number 16 in the Su-Casa Guest House in Islamabad, Pakistan, and captured Yousef before he could move to Peshawar. Parker was paid $2 million for the information leading to Yousef's capture (Rewards for Justice – RFJ). During the raid, agents found Delta and United Airlines flight schedules and bomb components in children's toys, Yousef had chemical burns on his fingers.

Yousef was sent to a prison in New York City and held there until his trial. In court he said, "'Yes, I am a terrorist, and proud of it as long as it is against the U.S. government and against Israel, because you are more than terrorists; you are the one who invented terrorism and using it every day. You are butchers, liars and hypocrites.'" On September 5, 1996, Yousef and two co-conspirators were convicted for their role in the Bojinka plot and were sentenced to life in prison without parole. U.S. District Court Judge Kevin Duffy referred to Yousef as "an apostle of evil" before recommending that the entire sentence be served in solitary confinement.

On November 12, 1997, Yousef was found guilty of masterminding the 1993 bombing, and in 1998 he was convicted of "seditious conspiracy" to bomb the World Trade Center towers. The judge sentenced Yousef to 240 years for the Trade Center attack, and life in prison for killing Haruki Ikegami in 1994.

Yousef is held at the high-security Supermax prison ADX Florence in Florence, Colorado. The handcuffs Ramzi Yousef wore when he was captured in Pakistan are displayed at the FBI Museum in Washington, DC. His Federal Prisoner number is: 03911-000.

Conversion to Christianity
According to interviews with ADX Florence staff, Yousef prayed almost every hour and refused to leave his cell for recreation when he first arrived at the facility; he did not wish to undergo the required strip search. Yousef made frequent, unsuccessful attempts to convert the American Timothy McVeigh, convicted of bombing the Oklahoma City Bombing, to Islam when sharing the same cell in "Bomber's Row." This cell block also holds the American Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski.

Yousef reportedly converted to Christianity in 2005. ""Ramzi Yousef is also there on Range 13. No one we have talked to who knows Yousef believes his change of religion is for real, despite the extraordinary steps of cutting his hair, eating pork and professing to be a Christian.""

- Henry Schuster

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
In 1997, Osama bin Laden said during an interview that he did not know Yousef but claimed to know Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is the mastermind behind the September 11, 2001 attacks and Yousef's uncle. According to the 9/11 Commission, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed said under interrogation that "Yousef was not a member of al Qaeda and that Yousef never met Bin Laden."