Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

WORLD TRADE CENTER BOMBING OF 1993 • 703Roberto D’Aubuisson was a protégé of General José AlbertoMedrano, who had organized ORDEN, the peasant militia thatevolved into a death squad that was officially abolished but notfully suppressed in November 1979. From 1979 until 1982 the UGBwas only one of numerous right-wing death squads operating in ElSalvador. During this period, killings by death squads sometimesexceeded 800 people each month and included among their victimsArchbishop Oscar Romero y Galdamez, killed on 24 March 1980.In 1982 D’Aubuisson founded and led the rightist Republican NationalAlliance Party (ARENA), itself suspected of sponsoring deathsquad activities. The ARENA party won the largest share of seatsin the new Constituent Assembly in 1982. With the ascendancy ofARENA, both the remnants of the UGB and ORDEN were absorbedinto D’Aubuisson’s new political organization.WORLD TRADE CENTER BOMBING OF 1993. On 26 February1993 at 12:17 p.m., a Ryder van packed with homemade explosivesdetonated in the parking lot under the north tower of the World TradeCenter in downtown Manhattan. The blast killed six people and injured1,042 and was considered the worst terrorist incident to haveoccurred within the United States until the Oklahoma City bombingof 19 April 1995, which caused far more deaths. The blast craterextended through five stories of the underground parking lot. Thebomb was estimated to have consisted of 1,500 pounds of explosivesmanufactured from urea, sulfuric acid, and nitric acid, materials laterfound in the possession of some of the suspects. The device was alsorigged with hydrogen gas cylinders and nitroglycerin blasting capsto amplify the explosion of the resulting fireball. The bomb makersalso had mixed sodium cyanide into the explosives in the hope thatthe explosion would produce hydrogen cyanide gas that could killmore people than would be killed by the explosion alone. The heatproduced by the explosion instead destroyed the cyanide.Forensic analysis of remaining fragments of the vehicle bomb revealedthe vehicle identification number, which allowed the FederalBureau of Investigation (FBI) to identify Mohammed A. Salamehas the person who rented the van, and Salameh was arrested withinfive days of the bombing. Salameh also had rented a storage lockerin New Jersey where the bomb-making materials were stored andshared an apartment with Nidal A. Ayyad, the chemical engineer