Ramzi Yousef

Ramzi Ahmed Yousef (born 27 April 1968) is a convicted terrorist who was one of the main perpetrators of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the bombing of Philippine Airlines Flight 434; he was also a co-conspirator in the Bojinka plot.

He was born on April 27, 1968, in Kuwait to supposedly a Baluch Pakistani father and a Palestinian mother.

His mother is believed to be a Palestinian and to be the sister of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

In 1986, he enrolled at Swansea Institute in Wales, where he studied electrical engineering, graduating four years later.

He also studied at the Oxford College of Further Education to improve his English.

Yousef left the United Kingdom after completing his studies and returned to Pakistan.

He began to learn bomb making in a terrorist training camp in Peshawar, before traveling to the United States in 1992.

On 1 September 1992, Yousef entered the United States with an Iraqi passport of disputed authenticity.

His companion, Ahmed Ajaj, carried multiple immigration documents, among which was a crudely falsified Swedish passport.

Providing a smokescreen to facilitate Yousef's entry, Ajaj was arrested on the spot when immigration officials found bomb manuals, videotapes of suicide car bombers, and a cheat sheet on how to lie to U.S. immigration inspectors in his luggage.

Directors of the American Counter-Terrorism program later tied the travel arrangements to a phone call from Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, an Egyptian militant Muslim preacher, to the Pakistani telephone number 810604.

Yousef was held for 72 hours and repeatedly interrogated, but INS holding cells were overcrowded.

Yousef, requesting political asylum, was given a hearing date of 9 November 1992.

He told Jersey City Police that he was Abdul Basit Mahmoud Abdul Karim, a Pakistani national born and brought up in Kuwait, and that he had lost his passport.

On December 31, 1992, the Pakistani Consulate in New York issued a temporary passport to Abdul Basit Mahmud Abdul Karim (SAAG 484 2002).

Yousef traveled around New York and New Jersey, during which time he made calls to Abdel-Rahman via cell phone.

Between 3 December and 27 December 1992, he made conference calls to key numbers in Balochistan, Pakistan (SAAG 484 2002).

He received two life sentences plus 240 years for his part in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and Bojinka plot.

Yousef's maternal uncle is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, with whom he allegedly planned the Bojinka plot.

The World Trade Center bombing was a terrorist attack that occurred on 26 February 1993, when a car bomb was detonated below Tower One of the World Trade Center in New York City, New York.

The 1,500 lb (680 kg) urea nitrate-hydrogen gas enhanced device was intended to knock the North Tower (Tower 1) into the South Tower (Tower 2), to bring both towers down and kill thousands of people.

It failed to do so, but killed six civilians and injured 1,042, including 919 civilians (including an EMS worker), 88 firefighters, and 35 police officers.

Ramzi Yousef sent a letter to The New York Times after the bombing that expressed his motive:

We are, the fifth battalion in the Liberation Army, declare our responsibility for the explosion on the mentioned building.

This action was done in response for the American political, economical, and military support to Israel, the state of terrorism, and to the rest of the dictator countries in the region.

If our demands are not met, all of our functional groups in the army will continue to execute our missions against the military and civilian targets in and out the United States.

For your own information, our army has more than hundred and fifty suicidal soldiers ready to go ahead.

The terrorism that Israel practices (which is supported by America) must be faced with a similar one.

The dictatorship and terrorism (also supported by America) that some countries are practicing against their own people must also be faced with terrorism.

The American people must know, that their civilians who got killed are not better than those who are getting killed by the American weapons and support.

The American people are responsible for the actions of their government and they must question all of the crimes that their government is committing against other people.

Or they — Americans — will be the targets of our operations that could diminish them.

In 1995, he was arrested by the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and U.S. Diplomatic Security Service at a guest house in Islamabad, Pakistan, while trying to set a bomb in a doll, then extradited to the United States.

Yousef was tried in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York along with two co-conspirators and was convicted of planning the Bojinka plot.

Mohammed is a senior al-Qaeda member accused of being the principal architect of the September 11 attacks in 2001.

Yousef is serving his life sentences at ADX Florence, located near Florence, Colorado.

He shared a cell block that is commonly referred to as "Bombers' Row" with Terry Nichols, Eric Rudolph, and Ted Kaczynski, before his transfer in late 2021.

In 2007, Ramzi Yousef claimed to have found Jesus and converted to Christianity.

The name "Ramzi Ahmed Yousef" is a pseudonym.

Yousef's real name is assumed to be Abdul Basit Mahmoud Abdul Karim.