Ramzi Yousef is found guilty of masterminding the World Trade Center bombing
Nearly five years after a van bomb went off beneath the World Trade Center, Ramzi Yousef was found guilty in Manhattan on November 12, 1997, of masterminding it. The bombing on February 26, 1993, had killed six civilians and injured 1,042. The trial opened August 3 and put more than 100 witnesses before the court, along with chemical and fingerprint evidence and telephone records. Witnesses also described bomb-making in Jersey City. Eyad Mahmoud Ismoil Najim, tried alongside him, was convicted of driving the van.
The case treated an attack on American soil as a crime to be proved with fingerprints, phone records, and witnesses in a federal courtroom in the city that was hit. Prosecution, not retaliation, was the American response here, and the Yousef verdict became the second major conviction in that effort.
QWhat was packed into the Ryder van besides the main explosive charge?
The main charge was urea nitrate, laced with particles of aluminum, magnesium, and ferric oxide. Around it sat a set of booster explosives: nitroglycerine, ammonium nitrate dynamite, smokeless powder, and fuse. Then came the oddest ingredient, three tanks of bottled hydrogen, included to enhance the fireball. The device was assembled by Yousef with Mohammed Salameh and Mahmud Abouhalima in his home on Pamrapo Avenue in Jersey City. It was a bomb designed with chemistry in mind, not just tonnage, and that is partly why chemical evidence carried so much weight with jurors years later.
QHow big was the hole the blast tore in the garage floors?
The explosion generated an estimated pressure of 150,000 pounds per square inch and opened a hole about 100 feet wide through four sublevels of concrete. The device weighed roughly 1,500 pounds, and its builders had a specific hope for it: that detonating beneath Tower One would knock the North Tower into the South Tower and bring both down, killing thousands. The towers stayed up. The garage, a place most visitors never thought about, took the damage that was meant for the buildings above it.
QWhy were so many of the injured hurt after the bomb had already gone off?
The blast instantly severed the World Trade Center's main electrical power line, which knocked out the emergency lighting system as well. People inside the towers were left in the dark, and smoke rose as high as the 93rd floor of both buildings. Most of the more than 1,000 injuries happened during the evacuation, as tens of thousands of occupants made their way down stairwells without light. Among the six people killed was a pregnant mother. The failure of the backup systems was part of what the damage assessment later made plain.
