Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

704 • WORLD TRADE CENTER BOMBING OF 1993who mixed the explosives in their apartment. Salameh and Ayyadshared a bank account that funded the purchase of the explosives andrental of the van. A New York taxi driver, Mahmud Abouhalima,who had helped prepare the explosives and who had bought fuel forthe van, was arrested in Egypt and extradited to the United States.Fingerprints on military bomb-making manuals found in Salameh’sapartment and records of Salameh’s telephone calls led police toanother suspect, Ahmad M. Ajaj, who was imprisoned at the time ofthe bombing.Two other key suspects named in federal indictments, Abdul RahmanYasin and Razmi Ahmad Yousef, had already fled the country.Yousef, who arrived from Pakistan six months before the bombing,was the mastermind behind the bombing and had entered the countrywith the specific intent of carrying out a terrorist attack on U.S. soil.On 7 February 1995 Yousef was arrested by FBI agents and StateDepartment diplomatic security officers in Pakistan and returned tothe United States the following day. On 12 November 1997 he andanother associate, Ismail Eyad, were convicted for their roles in theWorld Trade Center bombing and were sentenced to life imprisonmenton 8 January 1998.Shortly after the arrest of Salameh and Ayyad, it was learned thatboth had regularly attended a New Jersey mosque, the Masjid asSalaam, where the resident prayer leader was Sheikh Omar AbdulRahman, the blind Egyptian preacher and leader of the IslamicGroup (IG) in Egypt who had issued the decree of takfir to membersof the Munazzamat al Jihad authorizing the killing of Anwar Sadat.Although Sheikh Abdul Rahman was included on an official list ofsuspected terrorists prohibited from entering the United States, hemanaged nonetheless to obtain a visa from a U.S. consulate in Sudan.Although Sheikh Abdul Rahman afterward declared the bombingto have been contrary to Islam, such strong circumstantial evidencelinked him to the other suspects and to evidence regarding a broaderconspiracy to bomb public places that he was arrested in June 1993to await a separate trial to be held after the trial of the four main suspectsin the World Trade Center case.Not altogether separate from the question of an Islamic fundamentalistinspiration behind the bombing was the question ofpossible state sponsorship. Sheikh Abdul Rahman, Salameh, andAyyad all received funds from unknown sources abroad. Ahmad Ajaj