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| Timothy McVeigh, Terry Nichols and Ramzi Yousef (Part 4) |
| 2004-02-27 |
| I wrote this. Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. On February 26, 1993, Ramzi Yousef carried out the bombing of the World Trade Center and then flew to Karachi, Pakistan. My account of his subsequent activities is taken primarily from a couple of books. One is Maria Ressa’s Seeds of Terror: An Eyewitness Account of Al-Qaeda’s Newest Center of Operations in Southeast Asia, published in 2003. Ressa is CNN’s lead investigative reporter in Asia. The other book is Zachary Abuza’s Militant Islam in Southeast Asia: Crucible of Terror, also published in 2003. In Karachi in July 1993, Yousef introduced his high-school classmate Abdul Hakim Murad, an airline pilot, to his uncle Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who was Yousef’s uncle and Al Qaeda’s military chief. In early August 1994, these three met again in Karachi, this time also with Wali Khan Amin Shah, who at that time was living in Manila, Philippines, where he was organizing a cell for Al Qaeda. Soon after that meeting, Yousef took Murad to a secret facility in Lahore, Pakistan, where he spent 18 days teaching Murad how to make explosive devices that could be smuggled onto passenger airlines. During approximately that same period, Mohammed and Shah traveled to Manila. After the explosives instruction in Lahore, Murad returned to his home in Dubai, to wait for further instructions. Meanwhile, Yousef traveled to Basilan, a Moslem region in the southern Philippines, where he similarly attempted to teach members of the terrorist Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG) to make such explosives. Yousef eventually found those students to be too uneducated for the instruction. He therefore left them in September and moved to Manila to set up a bomb-making workshop there. The main task was still to develop bombs that could be smuggled onto passenger airliners. As a cover for their activities, Yousef and Shah formed a shell company, the Bermuda Trading Company, that primarily purchased chemicals that they would use to manufacture bombs. (Abuza, page 104) Meanwhile in the United States, Nichols and McVeigh purchased large quantities of ammonium nitrate for their planned bomb on September 30 and October 18 and purchased a large quantity of nitromethane on October 21 (Bad Company, page 161). In September, Philippine police arrested six ASG members, who during interrogation provided several leads toward several individuals in Manila. One such suspect was Tareq Kaved Rana, a Pakistani. (Abuza, page 102). The police increased surveillance of him and other suspects in and near Manila. Because of indications that a plot was developing to assassinate the Pope during a visit beginning on January 15, Philippine Presidential Security Group (PSG) became closely involved in this surveillance. (All information about the PSG is from Ressa’s book.) In late November, Yousef, Mohammed and Shah traveled to Cebu City to test some of the bombs that Yousef had made in his workshop. At the end of November, they exploded one bomb in the generator room of a shopping mall, and on December 1 they exploded a second bomb in a movie theater near the mall. These two tests demonstrated to the experimenters that the bomb itself did work. (Terry Nichols had arrived in Cebu City on November 23.) The three men then returned to Manila, where they began to verify their ability to smuggle the explosive materials onto airplanes. They poured the explosive liquids into bottles for contact-lens solution, and they taped the metal components to the soles of their feet. Mohammed demonstrated the effectiveness of this method on a flight from Manila to Seoul, Korea, while Yousef did so on a flight from Hong Kong to Taipai, Taiwan. On December 11, Yousef then exploded a bomb on a passenger airliner. On a flight from Manila to Cebu City, he assembled the bomb in the airplane’s bathroom and then planted the bomb under his seat. He got off the airplane in Cebu City. As the airplane continued to Tokyo, the bomb exploded, killing the new passenger in that seat, injuring several other passengers, and damaging the airplane, which nevertheless managed to make an emergency landing in Okinawa. Sometime that same December, a mysterious fire destroyed Rana’s home. Based on its surveillance of Rana, the PSG believed that the home had been regularly visited and occupied by Yousef and his associates, who caused the fire by accidentally exploding a bomb inside the home. A few days later, Yousef called Murad in Dubai and convinced him to move to Manila. At that time Murad was in the midst of an effort to become a professional airline pilot, so he was reluctant to move. He eventually agreed, however, and arrived in Manila on December 26. The PSG received reports in December that terrorists would travel from the Middle East to the Philippines that month for the purpose of assassinating the Pope. Murad moved in with Yousef in Apartment #603 in the Dona Josefa Apartments, a six-floor building. At that time, Yousef intended to use Murad to organize three attacks using airplanes as the weapons. The first attack would be to crash a crop-dusting airplane into the Pope’s motorcade. The second attack would be to crash a small plane filled with explosives into the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. The third attack would be to hijack a passenger airplane and to crash it into some important building in the United States. Murad was already planning a trip to the United States, but he was arrested by the Philippine police on January 6. Already the next day he told his interrogators about the three attack plans. In general, Murad said, he intended to kill – and to teach others to kill – Americans while in the United States. (Terry Nichols flew back to the United States on about January 18.) Murad was eventually extradited to the United States on April 12, 1995, exactly one week before the Oklahoma City bombing. To be continued. |
| Posted by:Mike Sylwester |
| #1 Mike, no comments yet. But keep it coming. |
| Posted by: Lucky 2004-2-28 12:27:05 AM |