Ramzi Yousef is found guilty of masterminding the 1993 World Trade Center Bombing.

November 12, 1997:  At the Federal District Court Trial in Manhattan, Ramzi Yousef is found guilty of masterminding the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.  On February 26, 1993, Yousef loaded a rented Ryder truck with 1,226 pounds of urea nitrate-hydrogen gas and detonated the vehicle in the parking garage below the North Tower of the World Trade Center.  He and his co-conspirators intended to bring the North Tower down via the explosion and send it crashing into the South Tower also bringing it down and killing tens of thousands of people in the process.

Hours after the explosion, Yousef escaped from the United States and fled to Iraq and eventually to Pakistan where two years later a paid informant tipped off Agents of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and Special Agents of the U.S. Diplomatic Security Service to Yousef’s whereabouts and he was captured.  When he was apprehended, agents found Delta and United Airlines flight schedules and bomb components in children’s toys.

At his trial Yousef stated:  “The Government in its summations and opening statement said that I was a terrorist. Yes, I am a terrorist and I am proud of it. And I support terrorism so long as it was against the United States Government and against Israel, because you are more than terrorists; you are the one who invented terrorism and using it every day. You are butchers, liars and hypocrites.”

U.S. District Court Judge Kevin Duffy sentenced Yousef to 240 years in prison for the attack as well as life in prison for the Flight 434 attack in 1994 and recommended that Yousef’s entire sentence be served in solitary confinement.  Yousef is currently imprisoned at the Federal Supermax prison ADX Florence in Florence, Colorado.