World Trade Center bombing
The World Trade Center bombing refers to the 1993 attack in the garage of the World Trade Center. For information on the 2001 terrorist attack, see: September 11 Terrorist Attacks
Before the attacks
A man named Ramzi Yousef entered the United States with a false Iraqi passport in 1992. Police found instructions on making a bomb in Yousef's partner's luggage. Therefore, his partner was arrested on the spot. At the time, INS holding cells were overcrowded, so the authorities Youssef to come back in one month. Youssef travelled around New York and New Jersey and called Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, a controversial Muslim preacher, via cell phone. Youssef got the manuals back from his partner. He got conspirators and tried obtaining mixing chemicals to make a bomb. After a hospital stay from a car accident, Youssef got back the manuals from his car, which was in a police impound.
Yousef stole or rented a Ryder van that was to be used in the attacks. If Yousef had more funds, he would have used a truck bomb. The van that he used has 295 cubic feet of space, which would hold up to 1,000 kilograms of explosives. However, the van was not filled to capacity.
Yousef's complex 600 kilogram bomb was made of urea pellets, nitroglycerine, sulphuric acid, aluminum azide, magnesium azide, and bottled hydrogen. He added sodium cyanide to the mix as the vapors could go through the ventilation shafts and elevators of the towers. Most bombs contained a velocity of 3,000 feet per second, but Yousef's bomb had a number five times greater, which was 15,000 feet per second.
The van that Yousef used had four twenty-foot long fuses, all covered in surgical tubing. Yousef calculated that the fuse would trigger the bomb in twelve minutes before he used a cheap cigarette lighter.
He wanted to prevent smoke from escaping the towers, therefore, catching the public eye. He foresaw Tower One collapsing onto Tower Two after the blast would occur.
The attack
On February 26, 1993, a car bomb was planted by the Islamist terrorists in the underground garage below Tower One. The bomb's fuses burnt at a rate of one inch per two and one half seconds.
The bomb exploded in the underground garage at 12:17 P.M., opening a 30 meter wide hole through 4 sublevels of concrete. The bomb generated a pressure of more than 70,000 kilograms per square inch.
However, only six people were killed and at least 1,040 were injured. The towers were not destroyed like how Yousef invisioned it to be. Yousef had escaped to Pakistan several hours later.
The bomb cut off the center's main electrical power line, and all telephone service for New York City. The bomb caused smoke to rise up to the 93rd floor of both towers, and cutoff the towers' four stairwells and emergency lighting system.
Despite its low death toll, the bombing shocked the American public. Only once before the 1993 attack that the FBI recorded had a bomb of that force had been used. The FBI has recorded a total of about 73,000 explosions.
On March 4, 1993 authorities announced the capture of one of the suspected bombing conspirators Mohammad Salameh and exactly one year later four terrorists were convicted for their roles in the bombing.
In 1995, militant Islamist Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman and nine others were convicted of conspiracy charges, and in 1998, Ramzi Yousef, believed to have been the mastermind, was convicted of "seditious conspiracy" to bomb the towers - no one was ever convicted for the actual bombing.
Six militant Islamist conspirators were convicted of the crime in 1997 and 1998 and given prison sentences of a maximum of 240 years each. The main reason that the World Trade Center did not collapse was due to the towers' strength and the fact that Yousef did not have enough money to built a more powerful bomb. In the course of the trial it was revealed that the FBI had an informant, an Egyptian man named Emad Salem, who was involved with the bombing conspiracy. Salem claims to have informed the FBI of the plot to bomb the towers as early as February 6, 1992, information he was privy to possibly because he himself initiated the plot. Salem's role as informant allowed the FBI to quickly pinpoint the conspirators out of the hundreds of possible suspects.
Salem asserts that the original plan was to have the plotters build the bomb using a harmless powder instead of actual explosive, but that an FBI supervisor decided that a real bomb should be constructed instead. He substantiates his claims with hundreds of hours of secretly-recorded conversations with his FBI handlers, made during discussions held after the bombings.
Salem says he wished to complain to FBI headquarters in Washington about the failure to prevent the bombing despite foreknowledge, but was dissuaded from doing so by the New York FBI office.
The FBI has not explicitly denied Salem's account.
This granite memorial erected in memory of the first attack was obliterated during the destruction of the towers in 2001.
See also terrorist incidents, Project Bojinka, September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack/Back history.
After the attacks
A granite memorial to the six victims of the bombing was erected between the Twin Towers, directly above the site of the explosion.Reference
