Trade Center Bomb Suspect Pleads Not Guilty To 11 Counts
A partial fingerprint discovered in a police raid on a cramped Manila apartment last month triggered an intense international manhunt that climaxed this week in the arrest and extradition from Pakistan of Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, the alleged mastermind of the World Trade Center bombing.
Yousef was arraigned in federal court in New York on Thursday morning and pleaded not guilty to 11 counts related to the February 1993 bombing.
U.S. law-enforcement sources suspect the 27-year-old Iraqi national was involved in many other terrorist plots during the past two years - including last December’s explosion aboard a Philippine Airlines flight to Tokyo, a scheme to assassinate Pope John Paul II during his trip to the Philippines last month and an abortive attack on the Israeli Embassy in Bangkok, Thailand, last spring.
These sources say he also planned to blow up an American commercial airliner in Bangkok earlier this month but aborted the attack because of tight security at the airport.
It was upon his return from Bangkok to Islamabad, Pakistan, that he was identified and shadowed by the authorities.
U.S. officials praised the cooperation of Pakistani authorities who arrested Yousef at an Islamabad Holiday Inn on Tuesday and immediately bundled him aboard a U.S. government plane which took him to New York.
A search of his hotel room turned up two toy police cars packed with explosives-laced cotton, timers, electronic diodes, bomb-making material and flight timetables for United and Delta airlines, according to law-enforcement sources.Investigators also found a magazine story about how Yousef was a suspect in the alleged assassination plot against the pope.
Yousef had been on the FBI’s “Most Wanted List,” with a $2 million reward for his capture, ever since he fled the United States shortly after the Feb. 26, 1993, trade center bombing that killed six people and injured 1,000.
The story of how Yousef was caught is a tale of alleged international terrorism spanning several countries in the Far East, close coordination of American and foreign intelligence and law-enforcement agencies and plain good luck.
It began with an explosion last December aboard Philippine Airlines Flight 434 en route from Manila. The blast ripped a 2-foot-square hole in the fuselage, killing one passenger and injuring 10 others.
The explosion placed Philippine authorities on heightened alert. Philippine officials particularly were concerned because the pope was scheduled to visit the islands in just a few weeks.
Philippine authorities assumed the pope would be a likely target and attempted to amass all intelligence on potential plots against the religious leader. They put out an alert for any unfamiliar “Arab-looking men” frequenting the area the pope was to visit.
On Jan. 6, they arrested two Muslim men, and a day later, they stormed an apartment near the papal nuncio’s compound. There they found fake security badges for the pope’s visit, diagrams of the prelate’s travel route, bomb-making materials like those used in the trade center explosion - and the fingerprint, which was passed on to American authorities.
Yousef evaded arrest in Manila and then was spotted in Bangkok, sources said, but he managed to board a flight to Islamabad. Pakistani authorities were waiting for him when he landed there last Sunday.