World Trade Center Bombing: 1993-94
& 1997

Defendants: First trial: Mahmud Abouhalima, Ahmad Ajaj, Nidal Ayyad, and Mohammed Salameh; second trial: Eyad Ismoil and Ramzi Yousef
Crimes Charged: Multiple offenses, including explosive destruction of property, conspiracy, interstate transportation of explosives, and assault on a federal officer
Chief Defense Lawyers: First trial: Hassen lbn Abdellah, Atig Ahmed, Austin Campriello, and Robert Precht; second trial: Ismoil: Louis Aidala; Yousef: Roy Kulcsar
Chief Prosecutors: First trial: J. Gilmore Childers; second trial: Lev Dassin and David Kelley
Judge: Kevin T. Duffy
Place: New York, New York
Dates of Trials: First trial: September 14, 1993-May 24, 1994; second trial: August 3-November 12, 1997
Verdicts: Both trials: Guilty
Sentences: First trial: All defendants: 240 years imprisonment; second trial: Ismoil: 240 years imprisonment; Yousef: Life imprisonment without parole

SIGNIFICANCE: The trials resulted in successful prosecutions for the bombing of the World Trade Center, the first large-scale terrorist attack in the United States of the 20th century.

The tremor felt by tourists at the Statue of Liberty on February 26, 1993, was not an earthquake. The shudder reaching across New York Harbor was the shock of a bomb smashing four underground levels of the World Trade Center, shaking the twin towers of the 110-story complex. Electricity and elevators were cut off, leaving hundreds of office workers and visitors huddling in terror or struggling down dark stairways choked with black smoke.

Six people were killed and over 1,000 were injured by the blast. The United States had seemed immune from such terrorist attacks until this explosion. As a chill of vulnerability touched the nation's cities, investigators crept into the teetering rubble of the World Trade Center's basement, looking for clues.

Van Deposit Leads to Arrests

Forensic investigators soon determined that the blast was caused by common explosives, detonated in a yellow van. They found the vehicle's charred identification number and traced it to a Ryder Rental Company agency in New Jersey. A few days later, the man who had rented the van told a federal agent posing as a rental clerk that the vehicle had been stolen. When the "clerk" refused to return a $400 deposit, the customer left in a huff. Federal agents grabbed him at a nearby bus stop and held him without bail.

The suspect was Mohammed Salameh, a Jordanian living in the United States with an outdated tourist visa. Other arrests quickly followed. Nidal Ayyad, a chemical engineer whose business card was discovered in Salameh's pocket, was also taken into custody. Bilal Alkaisi, who shared a joint bank account with Salameh and Ayyad, surrendered to the FBI. A fourth man, Mahmud Abouhalima, was arrested in Cairo and deported to the United States to face indictment. Abouhalima showed signs of having been tortured by Egyptian police. His American lawyer, William Kunstler, argued unsuccessfully that any admissions obtained by Egyptian authorities from Abouhalima were gotten under duress and should be ruled inadmissible. A fifth suspect, Ibrahim Elgabrowny, was accused of carrying false passports and resisting arrest. He was indicted with Salameh and Ayyad on March 19.

A Palestinian, Ahmad Ajaj, was also arrested, on May 6, 1993. The previous year, he had been detained at Kennedy International Airport for having a doctored passport and military manuals containing bomb-making instructions. After six months in detention, he had been released. When investigators learned that he had traveled to the United States on the same flight as Ramzi Ahmed Yousef—another suspect who had been seen with Salameh in the yellow van and whose fingerprints were found on the pages of the manuals in Ajaj's luggage—Ajaj was arrested again. Yousef, in the meantime, had disappeared. The FBI placed him on its 10-Most-Wanted list and a $2 million reward was offered for information leading to his arrest.

Far-Reaching Conspiracy Alleged

Ajaj, Ayyad, Salameh, and Abouhalima were charged with a total of 38 crimes, including explosive destruction of property, conspiracy, and interstate transportation of explosives. All the suspects except Ajaj were followers of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, a blind cleric who preached militant Islamic doctrine from a Jersey City storefront mosque. In late August 1993, Sheik Abdel Rahman and a dozen of his adherents were indicted for plotting "a war of urban terrorism against the United States." Under a rarely used seditious conspiracy law, the sheik was accused of guiding the group, whose alleged targets included the United Nations, New York's FBI office, and the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels connecting New York with New Jersey. The defendants were also accused of planning to kill Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and American politicians sympathetic to Israel.

Federal authorities declared that the World Trade Center bombing was one of the violent acts within this wider conspiracy. Salameh, Ayyad, Abouhalima, and Ajaj were named as coconspirators in the new case, but no fresh charges were added to those they already faced when their trial began on September 14, 1993. Judge Kevin T. Duffy was sufficiently concerned that publicity about the bombing had been so pervasive that he ordered an extra 5,000 jury duty summonses to be mailed. In fact, a jury was selected in less than a week.

Although none of the accused men had been seen at the site of the explosion, prosecutors attempted to tie them to the crime by sheer weight of circumstantial evidence. An entire month crawled by as hundreds of forensic exhibits were introduced, ranging from macabre photos of dead victims to dry architectural analyses of the World Trade Center's internal structure.

Defendants Tied to Van, Bomb Manuals

Testimony eventually got around to the defendants themselves. Prosecutors produced as evidence the frame of a vehicle that experts placed at the very center of the explosion. The serial number on the charred metal matched that of the yellow Ford van rented by Salameh. Bank officers testified that Salameh and Ayyad shared a joint account funded by undetermined overseas sources. A Jersey City chemical supplier relayed that Salameh and the fugitive, Yousef, had bought thousands of dollars of raw materials, which experts identified as primary components used in homemade bombs. Other witnesses recalled Ayyad ordering tanks of compressed hydrogen gas, which were delivered to a storage locker rented by Salameh and Yousef. When the storage company asked the renters to remove the tanks, the canisters were picked up by a yellow van.

A gas station attendant recalled two customers filling a yellow van's gas tank on the morning of the blast. When asked to identify the men in court, however, the attendant pointed to two jurors. The witness identified Abouhalima and Salameh when he returned to court the next day. Apart from this tenuous connection, the only physical evidence against Abouhalima consisted almost entirely of sulfuric acid burns on shoes found in his home. Prosecutors noted that the chemical could be used to make bombs. Hassen Ibn Abdellah, Abouhalima's attorney, pressed witnesses to admit that the substance could as easily have come from a car battery.

The New York Times received a letter from the Liberation Army Fifth Battalion claiming responsibility for the bomb after the blast occurred. DNA testing confirmed with a 97 percent probability that Ayyad's saliva had sealed the envelope. No such scientific evidence was offered in the case against Ajaj. The government, however, contended that Ajaj's possession of military manuals containing bomb-making instructions was sufficient proof of his complicity.

Austin Campriello, Ajaj's attorney, argued that possession of the manuals had resulted in his client's detention by immigration authorities on September 1, 1992 and therefore could not have been used in the bombing plot.

"What he slid over," Campriello said, faulting lead prosecutor J. Gilmore Childers's view of the confiscated manuals, "was that [Ajaj's] material was taken from him that very day and was in the possession of the United States government until the very day the World Trade Center tragedy occurred."

During four months of testimony from 207 witnesses, defense attorneys offered no rebuttal witnesses or evidence of their own. None of the defendants testified on his own behalf.

Verdicts Are Read

During closing arguments, Salameh's lawyer unexpectedly claimed that his client had been manipulated into unwittingly participating in the plot by the fugitive, Yousef. However, defense attorney Robert Precht's gamble did not pay off. After less than a week of deliberations, the defendants were found guilty of all 38 charges.

"Victory to Islam!" Ayyad shouted when the verdict was read.

The defendants dismissed their lawyers while awaiting sentencing. When they returned to court on May 24, 1994, all four were allowed to give statements.

Speaking in Arabic, each defendant protested that the trial was unfair. Salameh, Ayyad, and Abouhalima each gave long, angry political speeches, expressing their distaste for American society and their support for Islamic extremist movements around the globe. Unlike the others though, Ajaj called the bombing "a horrible crime." He then spoke for over two hours about atrocities committed against the Palestinian people. After witnessing and suffering from such violence, he said, he had no wish to act violently toward anyone.

Judge Duffy eventually cut him off. "All you've done in the past two and a half hours is convince me that anything you say is either a reworking of the truth or an out-and-out lie.… You were in this plot up to your ears."

Although all of the crimes in the case were serious, none was punishable by terms of life imprisonment under New York law. When the judge passed sentence, however, it was clear that the convicted men would spend the rest of their lives in prison.

The judge subtracted the ages of each of the six dead victims from an average life expectancy of 60 years. Together, according to this formula, the deceased had been denied a total of 180 years of possible life. To this sum, the judge added mandatory 30-year penalties for each of the two convictions of assault on a federal officer. The defendants were thus sentenced to 240 years in prison each, with no possibility of parole.

Ajaj appealed his conviction with the help of a new court-appointed attorney. Looking again at one evidentiary notebook on explosives, upon which the government had built much of its case, analysts found that Ajaj's handwriting did not match the incriminating notations in the book.

Ajaj also claimed that he had been planning to mail the other military manuals in his possession to the family of a Jordanian, who had been killed fighting in Afghanistan. He pointed out that the books were only part of a bundle of mail he had agreed to post for other Arabs he had met in Pakistan, whose mail systems to other countries were not as reliable as those of the U.S. Postal Service. Ajaj admitted that he had met Yousef, but insisted that the fugitive had neither revealed his real name nor spoken of any violent intentions.

Philippine Airline Plot

In the ensuing years, other figures in the wider conspiracy alleged by the government were brought to trial. Sheik Rahman was convicted on October 1, 1995, on conspiracy counts brought under the sedition charge and sentenced to life imprisonment without parole. During the sheik's trial, Ramzi Yousef was arrested in Pakistan and extradited to the United States. The indictment against him was so complicated that Judge Duffy divided the charges against Yousef into two separate court cases.

Before Yousef could face trial in the World Trade Center case, however, he stood accused of a potentially bloodier terrorist plan. Prosecutors charged that Yousef, Pakistani pilot Abdul Hakim Murad, and Wali Khan Amin Shah had conspired to detonate bombs aboard a dozen commercial airliners during a 48-hour period in January 1995. By killing an estimated 4,000 passengers en route from the Philippines to Los Angeles, San Francisco, Honolulu, and New York, the bombers hoped to force the United States to end aid to Israel. Shah was accused of testing a timer by leaving a bomb in a Manila theater on December 1, 1994. Yousef was charged with hiding a bomb on a Philippine Airlines flight to Tokyo on December 11 in a similar test; the bomb killed a Japanese passenger and injured 10 others.

Philippine police discovered the airline plot on January 6, 1995, when chemicals Yousef and Murad were mixing started a fire in a Manila apartment. Yousef fled to Pakistan, but Murad was arrested when he returned, allegedly to dispose of nitroglycerine, timers, bomb-making equipment, and manuals, as well as a computer containing details of the plot.

The three defendants pleaded not guilty when the trial began on May 13, 1996. They claimed they were beaten while in custody and that they had not been properly informed of their rights when they gave statements to FBI agents while being transported to the United States to face trial. The incriminating statements included a detailed account by Yousef of how the World Trade Center bomb was made and delivered. The FBI agents also claimed that Yousef had boasted of plots to assassinate Pope John Paul II and President Bill Clinton.

Judge Duffy, also presiding in the Philippine Airlines plot, ruled that these disputed statements were admissible at the trial and rejected a defense motion that the United States did not have jurisdiction in the airline case. Although the plot was to have been executed from the Philippines, Duffy pointed out that U.S. law allowed prosecuting any crime taking place aboard an international aircraft.

In addition to Yousef's admissions and voluminous bomb-related evidence linked to the trio, the most damaging exhibit was the laptop computer found in the Manila apartment. Under the file name "Bojinga," the computer's contents included the targeted jets' flight schedules, money transfers, identification photographs, and a threatening letter explaining that the attack was a response to U.S. financial, political, and military assistance to Israel.

Over the objections of his codefendants' attorneys and warnings from Judge Duffy, Yousef dismissed his court-appointed lawyer, Roy Kulcsar (who would represent Yousef later in the World Trade Center bombing trial). Yousef argued that he had been detained and tortured by Pakistani security forces in November 1994 when he was allegedly organizing the airline plot in Manila, but was contradicted by prosecution records showing that he was not arrested in Pakistan until February 1995.

With little apparent success in forwarding his defense, Yousef crossexamined an airline attendant who identified him as sitting in the seat later taken by the airline bomb victim. He declared that the evidence against him had been fabricated by the Philippine and Pakistani governments. Shah's and Murad's lawyers repeated this charge, pointing to testimony in which Manila investigators admitted filing false reports to justify searching the fire-damaged apartment where the evidence was discovered. Because the search had taken place in the Philippines and was not subject to U.S. rules of evidence, however, the discovery was ruled legitimate.

Boastful Admissions

On September 5, 1996, a jury found the three defendants guilty on all of the counts against them. Before they were sentenced, however, Yousef stood trial for complicity in the World Trade Center plot. When that trial began on August 3, 1997, Yousef's codefendant was a former schoolmate and chemical engineer named Eyad Ismoil. Prosecutors accused Ismoil of driving the explosive-laden van into the World Trade Center's underground garage and helping Yousef set the fuse. Ismoil had flown to Jordan that night, but was later arrested and extradited to the United States. Ismoil pleaded his innocence and protested that he thought the van contained only soap and shampoo.

Prosecutors ridiculed Ismoil's claim. For two months they introduced forensic testimony about residue and fingerprints found at bomb-making sites in New Jersey; telephone receipts; and other evidence linking both defendants to a Jersey City apartment where the bomb had been made.

The most damaging testimony against Yousef stemmed from his alleged boasting to American agents on his flight back to the United States from Pakistan. Aboard the plane, Yousef allegedly claimed that he had masterminded the plot and had initially considered mounting a poison gas attack. He hoped the bomb would topple one Trade Center tower into the other and kill at least 250,000 people. He was disappointed in the results of the blast, but stood on the New Jersey waterfront to watch the smoke from the fire across the river before he fled the country.

Neither of the defendants took the witness stand in their own defense, leaving the arguments to their lawyers. Defense attorney Kulcsar characterized Yousef's alleged admissions of guilt as illogically self-incriminating. Kulcsar wondered why the damaging confessions had never been recorded. Ismoil's attorney, Louis Aidala, admitted that his client had helped load the van but had been ignorant of its deadly contents.

Final Sentences

On November 12, 1997, Yousef and Ismoil were convicted on all the charges against them, including the lethal use of explosives, which carried a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment without parole. On January 8, 1998, Yousef was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole for participating in the World Trade Center bombing, the airline conspiracy, and causing the death of the Japanese passenger in the latter plot's "test run." Murad received a life sentence and was fined $250,000 so that he could not profit from the case. Shah began cooperating with authorities and was rumored to provide information about Saudi militant Osama bin Laden, whom U.S. authorities accused of being the mastermind behind explosions at two American embassies in Africa on August 7, 1998. Ismoil received a 240-year sentence calculated by the same formula Judge Duffy used in the first bombing trial, plus heavy fines that ensured Ismoil would never profit financially from telling his story.

The World Trade Center trials resulted in the prosecution of all but one of the accused participants, Abdul Rahman Yasin, whom federal authorities had detained but carelessly released after the blast. Yasin was thought to have escaped to Iraq. Despite the trials and convictions, the mystery of who financed the attack, however, still remains.

—Tom Smith

Suggestions for Further Reading

Childers, J. Gilmore. Statement before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on Technology, Terrorism, and Government Information, "Foreign Terrorists in America: Five Years after the World Trade Center" hearing. February 24, 1998. http://judiciary.senate.gov/childers.htm.

Dwyer, Jim et al. Two Seconds under the World. New York: Crown Publishers, 1994.

Reeve, Simon. The New Jackal: Ramzi Yousef, Osama bin Laden and the Future of Terrorism. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1999.