Significance: Mastermind of the World Trade Center bombing.
Background: Yousef, whose real name is Abd-al-Basit Balushi, was born either on May 20, 1967, or April 27, 1968, in Kuwait, where he grew up and completed high school. His Pakistani father is believed to have been an engineer with
Kuwaiti Airlines for many years. Yousef is Palestinian on his mother’s side; his grandmother is Palestinian. He considers himself Palestinian.
In 1989 Yousef graduated from Britain’s Swansea University with a degree in engineering. Yousef is believed to have trained and fought in the Afghan War. He and bin Laden reportedly were linked at least as long ago as 1989. In that year, Yousef went to the Philippines and introduced himself as an emissary of Osama bin Laden, sent to support that country's radical Islamic movement, specifically the fundamentalist Abu Sayyaf group. When Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s army invaded Kuwait in August 1990, Yousef was known as a collaborator. After disappearing in Kuwait in 1991, he is next known to have reappeared in the Philippines in December 1991, accompanied by a Libyan missionary named Mohammed abu Bakr, the leader of the Mullah Forces in Libya. Yousef stayed for
Ahmed Ramzi Yousef (Photo courtesy of
www.terrorismfiles.org/individuals/ramzi_ yousef.html/ )
three months providing training to Abu Sayyaf guerrillas in the southern Philippines.
When he arrived from Pakistan at John F. Kennedy Airport on September 1, 1992, without a visa, Yousef, who was carrying an Iraqi passport, applied for political asylum. Often described as slender, Yousef is six feet tall, weighs 180 pounds, and is considered white, with an olive complexion. He was sometimes clean shaven, but wears a beard in his FBI wanted poster. Despite his itinerant life as an international terrorist, Yousef is married and has two daughters. A Palestinian friend and fellow terrorist, Ahmad Ajaj, who was traveling with Yousef on September 1, 1992, although
apparently at a safe distance, was detained by passport control officers at John F. Kennedy Airport for carrying a false Swedish passport. Ajaj was carrying papers containing formulas for bomb-making material, which prosecutors said were to be used to destroy bridges and tunnels in New York.
Yousef was allowed to stay in the United States while his political asylum case was considered. U.S. immigration officials apparently accepted his false claim that he was a victim of the Gulf War who had been beaten by Iraqi soldiers because the Iraqis suspected that he had worked for Kuwaiti resistance. Yousef moved into an apartment in Jersey City with roommate
Mohammad Salameh (
q.v.
). After participating in the Trade Center bombing on February 26, 1993, Yousef, then 25 or 26 years old, returned toManila, the Philippines, that same day. In Manila,
he plotted “Project Bojinka,” a plan to plant bombs aboard U.S. passenger airliners in 1995, using a virtually undetectable bomb that he had created. He was skilled in the art of converting Casio digital watches into timing switches that use light bulb filaments to ignite cotton soaked in nitroglycerine explosive. He carried out a practice run on a Philippine Airlines Flight 434 bound for Tokyo on December 9, 1994. A wearer of contact lenses, Yousef concealed the
nitroglycerin compound in a bottle normally used to hold saline solution. His bomb killed a Japanese tourist seated near the explosive, which he left taped under a seat, and wounded 10 others. In March 1993, prosecutors in Manhattan
indicted Yousef for his role in the WTC bombing. On January 6, 1995, Manila police raided Yousef’s room overlooking Pope John Paul II’s motorcade route into the city. Yousef had fled the room after accidentally starting a fire while mixing chemicals. Police found explosives, a map of the Pope’s route, clerical robes, and a computer disk describing the plot against the Pope, as well as planned attacks against U.S. airlines. Yousef’s fingerprints were on the material, but he had vanished, along with his girlfriend, Carol Santiago. Also found in his room was a letter threatening Filipino interests if a comrade held in custody were not
released. It claimed the “ability to make and use chemicals and poisonous gas... for use against vital institutions and residential populations and the sources of drinking water.” Yousef’s foiled plot involved blowing up eleven U.S. commercial aircraft in midair. The bombs were to be made of a stable, liquid form of
nitroglycerin designed to pass through airport metal detectors.
For most of the three years before his capture in early 1995, Yousef reportedly resided at the bin Laden-financed Bayt Ashuhada (House of Martyrs) guest house in Peshawar, Pakistan. On February 8, 1995, local authorities arrested Yousef in Islamabad in the Su Casa guest house, also owned by a member of the bin Laden family. Yousef had in his possession the outline of an even greater international terrorist campaign that he was planning, as well as bomb-making products, including two toy cars packed with explosives and flight schedules for United and Delta Airlines. His plans included using a suicide pilot (Said Akhman) to crash a light aircraft filled with powerful explosives into the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, as well as blowing up 11 U.S. airliners simultaneously as they
approached U.S. airports. He was then turned over to the FBI and deported to the United States. On June 21, 1995, Yousef told federal agents that he had planned and executed the WTC bombing.
On September 6, 1996, Yousef was convicted in a New York Federal District Court for trying to bomb U.S. airliners in Asia in 1995. On January 8, 1998, he was sentenced to 240 years in prison. He has remained incarcerated in the new “supermax” prison in Florence, Colorado. His cellmates in adjoining cells in the "Bomber Wing" include Timothy McVeigh, the right-wing terrorist who blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, and Ted Kaczynski, the sociopathic loner known as the Unabomber. The polyglot Yousef has discussed languages with Kaczynski, who speaks Spanish, French, and German, and taught him some Turkish.