Ramzi Yousef

Ramzi Ahmed Yousef or Ramzi Mohammed Yousef (also transliterated as Ramzi Yusuf, Ramzi Youssef) (رمزي يوسف Ramzī Yūsuf), birth name possibly Abdul Basit Mahmoud Abdul Karim (عبد الباسط كريم) and also known by dozens of aliases, was born in Kuwait and is of Pakistani descent. He was one of the planners of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. In 1995, he was arrested at a guest house in Islamabad, Pakistan by the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence directorate and Special Agents of the U.S. Diplomatic Security Service (DSS), United States Department of State  and was extradited to the United States.

He was tried in New York City in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York and along with two co-conspirators 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 life in prison without parole. Yousef's uncle is Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a senior al-Qaeda member also in U.S. custody.

Early life
Yousef was born in Kuwait to a family of labourers originally from Balochistan, Pakistan. While the rest of the family returned to Pakistan in the mid 1980s, Yousef was sent to England to continue his education. He wears contact lenses.

In 1986, he enrolled at Swansea Institute in Wales, where he majored in Electrical Engineering, while also studying at the Oxford College of Further Education to improve his English. He graduated from Swansea four years later.

Yousef later attended an Al-Qaeda training camp and became an expert in bomb making which would play a large part in the WTC bombing.

1993 World Trade Center bombing
The 1993 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), bringing both towers down and killing thousands of people. It failed to do so, but did kill six people and injured 1,042.

Ramsi Yousef sent a letter to the New York Times after bombing the WTC; it spelled out the 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 the Japanese in the Atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Yousef arrives in America
On September 1, 1992, a few days after leaving Khalden training camp in Afghanistan, Yousef allegedly entered the United States with an Iraqi passport of disputed authenticity. His companion Ahmed Ajaj, carried multiple immigration documents, among them a crudely falsified Swedish passport. Providing a smokescreen to facilitate Yousef's entry, Ajaj was arrested on the spot as bomb manuals, videotapes of suicide car bombers, and a cheat sheet on how to lie to U.S. immigration inspectors were found in his luggage. Directors of the American Counter-Terrorism program later tied the travel to a phonecall by Omar Rahman to the Pakistani telephone number 810604.

Yousef was held for 72 hours and repeatedly interrogated, but INS holding cells were overcrowded and Yousef, claiming political asylum, was given a hearing date of November 9, 1992. He told Jersey City Police his name was Abdul Basit Mahmud Abdul Karim, a Pakistani national born and brought up in Kuwait, and had lost his passport. 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 and called Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, a militant Muslim preacher, via cell phone. Between 3 December and 27 December 1992, he made conference calls to key numbers in Baluchistan. (SAAG 484 2002)

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

Assembling the bomb
Aided by Mohammed Salameh and Mahmud Abouhalima, both present in El Sayyid Nosair's home the night Rabbi Meir Kahane was assassinated, Yousef, in his Pamrapo Avenue home in Jersey City, began assembling the 1,500-lb urea nitrate-fuel oil device for delivery to WTC on February 26, 1993. He ordered chemicals from his hospital room when injured in a car crash — one of three accidents caused by Salameh in late 1992 and early in 1993.

Speaking in code by phone 29 December 1992, Ajaj told Yousef that he had won release of the bomb manuals, but warned Yousef that picking them up himself might jeopardize his "business." On one book carried by Ajaj in 1992 was a word translated by the FBI as "the basic rule" - later found actually to be "al Qaeda" - "the base." (Lance 2004 p 32 )

During a CBS interview, co-conspirator Abdul Rahman Yasin said Ramzi originally wanted to bomb Jewish neighborhoods in New York City. Yasin added that after touring Crown Heights and Williamsburg, Yousef changed his mind. Yasin alleged that Yousef was educated in bomb-making at a training camp in Peshawar.

Explosion and aftermath
Yousef rented a Ryder van and on February 26, 1993, loaded it with explosives. Four cardboard boxes were packed into the back of the van, each containing a mixture of paper bags, newspapers, urea and nitric acid. Next to them were placed three red metal cylinders of compressed hydrogen, and 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 (in a later interrogation Yousef told investigators that the plan had been to take out structural parts of the foundation and make one tower collapse into the other). With his Pakistani passport, he fled to Iraq hours later. He remained at large until his capture in 1995.

1993 Benazir Bhutto assassination attempt
After returning to Pakistan in February 1993, in hiding from the unsuccessful attempt to destroy the World Trade Center, Yousef allegedly took up a contract in the summer of 1993 initiated by members of Sipah-e-Sahaba to assassinate the Prime Minister of Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto. The plot failed when Yousef and Abdul Hakim Murad were interrupted by police outside Bhutto’s residence. At this point Yousef decided to abort the bombing; however, as they attempted to recover it the device blew up. Yousef went into hiding during the investigation.

Bombing Iranian Shrine
After failing to bomb the Israeli embassy in Bangkok, Thailand, Razmi Yousef moved back to Pakistan and plotted a bombing inside Iran. Yousef, a Sunni Muslim, has a deep hatred of Shiite Muslims, and most Iranians are Shiites. On June 20, 1994, Yousef bombed Imam Reza shrine, killing 26 people and injuring over 200 more. The mosque is an important shrine and one of the holiest Shiite sites in Iran, and the attack also took place on a Shiite holy day. The group Yousef worked with this time included 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, the Mashhad bombing ran counter to bin Laden’s efforts to work with the Iranian-influenced Hezbollah militant group this same year.

The Bojinka Plot
After the foiled attempt on Bhutto's life, Yousef soon began planning his unsuccessful Bojinka Plot. The plan involved assassinating Pope John Paul II during a visit to the Philippines, then, while attention was drawn to the Pope's death, bombs would be placed inside toy cars and planted on United and Delta flights out of Bangkok.

Istaique Parker
In order to test whether Bojinka would work, Yousef conducted a number of trial runs. For his first "trial run" he recruited Istaique Parker, a South African Muslim living in Pakistan. Parker flew to Bangkok with Yousef where they built the devices. Parker got cold feet at the last minute and could not check-in the luggage containing the bombs.

After returning to Pakistan, Parker became aware of the $2 million bounty being offered by the U.S. government for the capture of Yousef. Shortly later Parker contacted the United States Embassy in Islamabad and became an informant.

With knowledge of the huge reward he interviewed as well as interrogated many of Yousef's family. Almost all of them denied knowledge of his activities, but the two brothers Adam and Hassane Basma agreed to cooperate with CIA officials. Although their knowledge was minimal, Adam's confessions led to a belief that he took part in the bombings. When he was convicted he believed that his brother had exposed him and made false accusations of Hassane's part in the crime. Soon Hassane and Adam were released for lack of evidence. The two decided to discontinue cooperation with the authorities given the difficulties it had caused them. Yousef, however, continued attempting to attack American targets.

Philippine Airlines Flight 434
Still needing a successful trial run, Yousef boarded a Philippine Airlines plane, a Boeing 747 designated as flight 434 from Manila to Tokyo, Japan with a stopover at Cebu, on December 11, 1994. His identity for the flight was that of an Italian man named Armaldo Forlani. The cabin crew for this leg of the flight would later tell investigators that Yousef changed seats several times during the relatively short flight, his last seat change coming after a return from the lavatory.

When Yousef went into the lavatory with his dopp kit in hand, he took off his shoes to get the batteries, wiring, and spark source hidden in the heel (below where metal detectors in use at the time could detect), removed an altered Casio digital watch from his wrist to be used as a timer, unpacked the remaining materials from his dopp kit, and assembled his bomb. He set the timer for four hours later, approximately the time at which the plane would be far out over the ocean en route to Tokyo, then put the entire bomb back into his dopp kit and returned to his current seat. The bomb was tucked into the life vest pocket under his seat, seat number 26K, where it would be out of the view by ground crews cleaning the plane at Cebu, and made one more seat change. In older 747s, seat 26K is directly over the center fuel tank, where rupture by a bomb would cause the airplane itself to explode even if the initial bomb blast did not cause sufficient damage to crash the plane. Philippine domestic flight attendant Maria Delacruz noticed that Yousef kept switching seats during the course of the Manila to Cebu flight, but got off the plane at Cebu with the rest of the domestic flight crew and did not pass the information along to the international flight crew that boarded at Cebu for the trip to Tokyo.

Yousef and 25 other passengers got off the plane at Cebu, while 256 more passengers and a new cabin crew boarded the plane for the final leg of the flight to Tokyo, Japan. After a 38-minute delay, the flight took off, with a total of 273 passengers on board, and 24-year old Haruki Ikegami (池上春樹), a Japanese businessman, occupying 26K. Four hours after Yousef planted his bomb, the device exploded, killing Ikegami and injuring an additional 10 passengers in adjacent seats. The blast blew a hole in the floor, and the cabin's rapid expansion from the explosion severed several control cables in the ceiling (cables that controlled the plane's right aileron, and cables that connected to both the pilot and first officer's steering controls). By chance, however, this particular 747 (the "SAS" model) had a different seating configuration and seat 26K was two rows forward of the center fuel tank, so the hole in the floor punched through to the cargo hold instead, sparing the plane from a fiery explosion. In addition, the bomb's orientation—positioned front-to-back and upward angled from horizontal—caused the blast to expand vertically and lengthwise; while this configuration ripped Ikegami's body in two and injured passengers in front of and behind the seat, Ikegami's body absorbed most of the blast force and the plane's outer structure was spared. Had the same bomb been oriented side-to-side, it would have likely punched straight through the plane's skin and caused the plane to break up from explosive decompression. Additionally, the 38-minute delay in takeoff from Cebu meant the plane was not as far out to sea as anticipated, contributing to the captain's options available for an emergency landing.

In spite of the damage to the steering and aileron controls, the cockpit crew coordinated throttle settings and air speed decreases to get the plane turned back toward land, and Captain Eduardo Reyes was able to make an emergency landing at Naha Airport on Okinawa (southern Japan), saving 272 passengers and 20 crew. The plane quickly turned into a crime scene, and 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.

Unravelling
After the successful test run of his trial bomb, Yousef returned to Manila and began preparing at least a dozen bombs, each with a higher concentration of explosive materials. But just weeks before the Bojinka Plot was due to be launched, a fire started in Yousef's Manila flat; the fire made the apartment staff suspicious, and police, led by Aida Fariscal, raided the flat and soon uncovered the plot. A Philippine National Police raid in a Manila apartment also turned up evidence that Abdul Murad, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Yousef had drawn up plans for flying an airplane into CIA headquarters. The information was passed on to the FAA, who warned individual airlines.

Arrest, conviction and prison life
Soon after the 1993 attack, the FBI, on April 21, 1993 made him the 436th person added to the Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list.

Pakistani intelligence, and U.S. Bureau of Diplomatic Security Special Agents including Bill Miller and Jeff Riner, captured Yousef in Islamabad, Pakistan. On February 7, 1995, they raided room #16 in the Su-Casa Guest House in Islamabad, Pakistan, and captured Yousef before he could move to Peshawar. He was captured thanks to Istaique Parker, a man Yousef had tried to recruit. Parker was paid $2 million for the information leading to Yousef's capture. When he was discovered, Yousef had chemical burns on his fingers. Agents found Delta Air Lines and United Airlines flight schedules and bomb components in children's toys.

He was sent to a prison in New York City and held there until his trial. In court, Yousef 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 towers.

He 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.

According to interviews with ADX Florence staff, upon Yousef's arrival at the facility he prayed almost every hour and refused to leave his cell for recreation as he did not wish to undergo the strip search required at the ultra-high security prison. However, Yousef now leaves his cell, has started eating pork and says he has converted to Christianity. The prison staff does not believe Yousef's conversion is sincere.

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