Ramzi Yousef (27 April 1968-), born Abdul Basit Mahmoud Abdul Karim, was a Pakistani leader of al-Qaeda who was the mastermind of the bombing of the World Trade Center on 26 February 1993, Philippine Airlines Flight 434 on 11 December 1994, and the failed Bojinka mass-casualty attack plot. He was arrested for his acts of terror in 1995 and incarcarated at ADX Florence Supermax Prison by the United States.
Biography[]
Ramzi Yousef was born on 27 April 1968 in Kuwait to Pakistani parents, and his birth name is believed to be Abdul Basit Mahmoud Abdul Karim. He was the maternal nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a Baloch al-Qaeda leader and Islamist ideologue. In the mid-1980s, his family returned to Pakistan, but Abdul Karim studied abroad in England instead, enrolling at the Swansea Institute in Wales and studying electrical engineering (he also studied at Oxford to study the English language). After completing his studies, he returned to Pakistan, where he became involved in Islamic extremism, and he learned bomb-making at a terrorist camp in Peshawar before heading to the United States in 1992.
On 26 February 1993, he was responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, killing six people and wounding over one thousand. He claimed that he was from "the fifth battalion in the Liberation Army" and demanded that the USA stop economic, military, and political aid to Israel and cease interfering with Middle Eastern interior affairs. His co-conspirator Abdul Rahman Yasin later said that he planned to bomb Jewish neighborhoods in New York City in an anti-Semitic attack plot. In 1993, an attempt to assassinate Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto with a bomb failed due to police intervention, and his 11 December 1994 bombing of Philippine Airlines Flight 434 killed one Japanese businessman and wounded ten people in another attack regarded as a failure. Yousef headed to Manila in the Philippines to build more bombs, and on 31 January 1995 he flew to Thailand to plan the bombings of a Delta Airlines flight and a United Airlines flight. This was just one segment of the Bojinka plot; he also wanted to assassinate Pope John Paul II and use a hijacked plane to crash into the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia as an improvised explosive. On 7 February 1995, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) intelligence agency of Pakistan arrested him and turned him over to the United States, and on 5 September 1996 he was sentenced to life imprisonment at ADX Florence without parole.