It doesn’t matter where you come from, you surely remember what you were doing the moment you learned about the attacks of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. The images of one of New York’s landmarks being hit by two planes and suddenly crumbling into the ground were so shocking that the entire world got paralyzed with the news.
Minutes after the first plane hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center complex, US authorities learned the plane had been hijacked. Soon after, a second plane hit the South Tower, making it clear it had been a terrorist attack. By whom? We all remember the frightening video where Al-Qaeda’s leader, Osama bin Laden, claimed himself as the intellectual author of the attacks.
It was the first time most Americans (and the world) would hear about this terrorist organization or even that the US was the main target of terrorism. However, this was certainly not the first terrorist attack on American soil nor the iconic World Trade Center in New York. Eight years before 9/11, another attack forced 50,000 WTC workers to evacuate after the complex was bombed.
What happened?
On the morning of February 26, 1993, at 11:17, a set of bombs exploded in the parking garage of New York’s World Trade Center. A van loaded with about 1,300 pounds of mainly domestic chemicals exploded under the garage of the North Tower. Six people died; about a thousand were wounded.
The plan was to tear down the North Tower and consequently the South one. The bomb wasn’t strong enough to cause but some minor damage to the structure. However, the implications and gravity of the act were an urgent matter of National Security. Just minutes after the explosion, the FBI, together with the NYPD and the JTTF (New York Joint Terrorism Task Force), started a thorough investigation.
Months before the attack, the FBI and the JTTF had been working on a special investigation on Islamic fundamentalists tracked on the city. So, when the explosion happened on the WTC, the alarms went immediately to these groups. They weren’t wrong.
Right the day after the attack, the investigation team found parts of the van where the bombs detonated. The van was registered as stolen the day before in New Jersey. With the ID numbers, the team rapidly identified some of the responsible for the attack.
The main suspects
The van was under the name of Mohammed Salameh. When he tried to get the deposit back from the car agency, the FBI caught him. More or less at the same time, the investigators found some of the same chemicals used on the bombs on a storage unit in Jersey, while The New York Times was receiving a letter from an Islamic group called Liberation Army, Fifth Battalion, claiming responsibility for the attack.
While investigating Salameh, the name of three other individuals came up. The names of the bombers were soon connected to the same mosque, which was led by a very prominent extremist leader known as the Blind Sheikh.
Four of the suspects were eventually captured and tried, but there was one name that resonated the most, and that managed to escape the authorities for years. That was Ramzi Yousef, a Pakistani man responsible for this and another terrorist attack.
Ramzi Yousef, the World Trade Center bomber
By March 1994, the four suspects were already sentenced and imprisoned. The investigation now focused on Yousef as the mastermind behind the attack and the driver of the van that contained the explosives.
For about two years, Yousef managed to escape the FBI’s radar. During this time, he would carry out another bombing on a commercial airplane in the Philippines. In 1995, seeking the 2 million reward set on Yousef’s head, an anonymous man claimed Yousef was living in Pakistan. In collaboration with the Pakistani government, the FBI managed to catch Yousef in his hotel room.
Ramzi Yousef was finally sentenced in 1998, five years after the attacks. His response shocked the authorities; he had no regrets about the attacks. In fact, he confessed it had been just a small punishment to the US for providing aid to Israel. He closed his trial by saying: “Yes, I am a terrorist and proud of it.”
Connection to Al-Qaeda and 9/11
It was later discovered that the attack had been financed by Yousef’s uncle, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, or KSM as he was going to be known. By then, the names Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda were basically known only to specialists investigating several Islamic extremists groups. Soon, they would be linked to the 1993 WTC bombings.
KSM plotted the WTC attack and the bombing of the planes in the Philippines with Ramzi. He was a high-ranked militant of Al-Qaeda and would become one of bin Laden’s most influential military men. As a matter of fact, he would be known as the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks of 2001.
Besides KSM, another name would gain importance in the attacks of 2001, and that was Abdel Rahman. In 1993, one year after the bombings, he was arrested by the FBI while making a bomb in Queens. It was revealed that this group had also planned on bombing the UN headquarters and other landmarks like the George Washington Bridge and the Lincoln Tunnels.
Despite being in jail, Rahman would gain more and more influence among radical Islamists. He is often known as well as a “spiritual guide” that led to 9/11.
When we talk about terrorist attacks, especially in the US, it’s impossible not to think first about 9/11. The bombings of 1993, have been forgotten by the collective memory, and those too young to have lived at the time have no idea this happened. The truth is, that almost a decade before the tragic events of September 11, US intelligence knew already about these groups, and the possibility of experiencing a terrible attack had been foreseen since the first half of the nineties. These attacks are just consequences of political movements; sadly, the consequences are mostly paid by civilians with no interjection whatsoever.
Photos from Wikimedia Commons
