On February 26, 1993 an attack at the World Trade Center in New York killed six people and injured more than 1,000. Twenty-two months later, on December 11, 1994, an attack on Philippine Airlines Flight 434, which was flying from Cebu in the Philippines to Japan, killed a 24-year-old Japanese passenger, Haruki Ikegami. The man a federal jury in Manhattan found responsible for both was Ramzi Ahmed Yousef. He was tried twice before Judge Kevin Thomas Duffy in the Southern District of New York, once in 1996 for the airline case and once in 1997 for the World Trade Center case, and on both occasions the jury returned guilty verdicts on every count.
Yousef was born in Kuwait in 1968 and was the object of a two-year manhunt after the 1993 attack. Pakistani authorities arrested him in Islamabad on February 7, 1995, and FBI agents flew him to New York the next day. On January 8, 1998 Judge Duffy sentenced him to 240 years for the World Trade Center counts and to life imprisonment on each of the eight airline counts, the terms to run one after the other. The Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit affirmed the judgments on April 4, 2003.
The counts on which he was convicted were framed under federal terrorism and aviation statutes. One of them, Count Nineteen, concerned the death of the passenger on Flight 434.
Yousef was born in Kuwait. His date of birth is given as April 27, 1968. Investigators settled on the name Abdul Basit for the man who used the name Ramzi Yousef, and gave the same year of birth in Kuwait, but they were never fully certain of it.
Little else about his early life is firmly established. He is said to have studied in Britain in the late 1980s, taking English courses at Oxford and completing a degree in electronics engineering at a small institute in South Wales. Authorities could not establish where he spent most of his early life. A former senior FBI official described him years later as a very shadowy figure.
He arrived in New York in September 1992, five months before the attack on the World Trade Center, and he was named in an indictment in March 1993.
The World Trade Center, in lower Manhattan, held tens of thousands of workers and visitors. On Friday, February 26, 1993, an attack there killed six people and injured more than 1,000. About 50,000 people were forced to leave the twin towers. The property damage was put at more than $500 million.
The indictment later returned against Yousef and Eyad Ismoil, the man tried beside him in 1997, ran to eleven counts. The sentence imposed on Yousef for them was 240 years.
Six people died on February 26, 1993. They were John DiGiovanni, 45; Robert Kirkpatrick, 61; Stephen Knapp, 47; William Macko, 57; Wilfredo Mercado, 37; and Monica Rodriguez Smith, 35.
Mr. DiGiovanni was the only visitor among them. The restitution ordered at Yousef's sentencing was directed at the families of those killed and injured in the 1993 attack.
The New York Joint Terrorism Task Force led the inquiry, and about 700 FBI agents worldwide eventually worked on it. On March 4, 1993 the FBI arrested Mohammad Salameh, and over the following weeks investigators arrested Nidal Ayyad in New Jersey and Mahmud Abouhalima in Egypt, both on March 10, 1993. Ahmad Mohammad Ajaj was indicted in May 1993.
Yousef's name became known to investigators within weeks of the attack. A first indictment naming him was returned on March 11, 1993, and a fifth superseding indictment followed on September 1, 1993. By then he was a fugitive. He remained out of reach of the authorities for the next two years.
Salameh, Ayyad, Abouhalima and Ajaj were tried first. Their trial opened on September 16, 1993, and on March 4, 1994 a jury convicted all four on all 38 charges. Each was sentenced to 240 years in prison. Lawyers for one of the four argued that their client had been used by Yousef and had not known what he was part of, an argument that in effect acknowledged Yousef's involvement and was set against the prosecution's description of him as the mastermind of the conspiracy.
The four were resentenced in 1999 to more than 100 years each. Later, after one part of their convictions was dropped to bring them into line with a ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court, their sentences were reduced again, in the year before February 2021. One of the four had 30 years removed in January 2021 and, as of that month, could be freed at the age of 96; the other three could be freed only if they lived to 100.
On Sunday, December 11, 1994, Philippine Airlines Flight 434, a Boeing 747 on a route from Manila to Narita in Japan with a stop at Cebu, was attacked in flight after leaving Cebu. The crew landed the aircraft at Naha, on Okinawa. One passenger, Haruki Ikegami, a 24-year-old Japanese man, died.
Authorities did not at first link the attack to Yousef. The Philippine investigation that eventually did so began with an unrelated event a few weeks later.
On January 6, 1995 Philippine police arrested Abdul Hakim Murad in Manila. Murad gave police information about a plan against U.S. commercial aircraft. The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration issued a security alert for American airliners crossing the Pacific three days later.
Murad was extradited to the United States in April 1995 and testified against Yousef at trial. On May 15, 1998 he was sentenced to life imprisonment on Counts Twelve to Sixteen and to two consecutive 30-year terms on Counts Seventeen and Eighteen (18 U.S.C. section 924(c)).
Pakistani officials, working with a State Department agent, arrested Yousef in Islamabad on February 7, 1995. The next day FBI agents took him into custody and flew him to the United States. The Justice Department announced the arrest on February 8, 1995, when Attorney General Janet Reno said that Yousef, a fugitive indicted for the World Trade Center attack, had been returned to the United States to face the charges. U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White's office, in the Southern District of New York, was to prosecute. The State Department's Diplomatic Security Service, the DEA and the FBI were named as the agencies involved.
Yousef was expected to be arraigned in federal court in Manhattan within days. The indictment against him then carried eleven counts, the most serious of which carried a maximum penalty of life imprisonment without parole.
Two sets of charges were brought. The World Trade Center indictment, returned in 1993 and later superseded, listed eleven counts against Yousef and against Eyad Ismoil, who was arrested in Jordan in August 1995. A superseding indictment of February 21, 1996 combined the World Trade Center counts with the airline charges, twenty counts in all. Counts One to Eleven concerned the World Trade Center. Counts Twelve to Twenty, renumbered One to Nine for the 1996 trial, concerned the airline case and were brought against Yousef, Murad and Wali Khan Amin Shah.
The airline counts, by statute, were these. Count Twelve was a conspiracy under 18 U.S.C. section 371 to violate section 32(a)(1) and (2), the sections on aircraft destruction. Counts Thirteen and Fourteen charged attempts under section 32(a)(1) and (7) and section 32(a)(2) and (7). Count Fifteen charged a conspiracy to kill U.S. nationals outside the United States under section 2332(b) and (d). Count Sixteen charged a conspiracy under section 2332a. Counts Seventeen and Eighteen charged offenses under section 924(c) and section 2. Count Nineteen, which was brought against Yousef alone, charged an offense under section 32(b)(3), section 34 and section 2 concerning an aircraft registered in another country; it was the count under which the death of the passenger on Flight 434 was charged.
The airline case was tried before Judge Duffy in the Southern District of New York from May 29 to September 5, 1996. The defendants were Yousef, Murad and Wali Khan Amin Shah. The jury deliberated for four days and on September 5, 1996 found all three guilty on all counts. All three were convicted of a conspiracy directed at U.S. commercial aircraft over Asia, and Yousef was also found guilty on the count concerning the death on Flight 434.
The verdicts carried a mandatory life sentence. Murad was sentenced on May 15, 1998, and Yousef on January 8, 1998, on the same day as in the World Trade Center case.
The World Trade Center case against Yousef and Eyad Ismoil was tried before the same judge, again in Manhattan, from July 15 to November 12, 1997. On November 12, 1997 the jury found both men guilty on all counts. Ismoil, who had been arrested in Jordan in August 1995, was sentenced on April 3, 1998 to 240 years, a $250,000 fine and $10 million in restitution, the judge saying the restitution was meant to ensure he never profited from the attack.
Judge Duffy sentenced Yousef on January 8, 1998. On the World Trade Center counts he imposed 180 years on Counts One to Eight and two consecutive terms of 30 years on Counts Nine and Ten under 18 U.S.C. section 924(c), 240 years in all. On the eight airline counts he imposed life imprisonment on each, to run consecutively to the 240 years. He ordered restitution of $250 million. Prosecutors had not asked for the death penalty. Proceeds of any book or film about the case were to go to the victims.
The judge said he would recommend that Yousef spend the rest of his life in solitary confinement, a recommendation the Bureau of Prisons had to approve. Before the sentence was passed, Yousef addressed the court.
The appeals were heard together. Yousef, Murad and Shah appealed in the airline case and Yousef and Ismoil in the World Trade Center case. The Second Circuit heard argument on May 3, 2002, before Chief Judge Walker and Circuit Judges Winter and Cabranes, and decided the appeals on April 4, 2003. It affirmed the judgments, except that it modified Ismoil's restitution requirements.
On the airline counts the central issue was jurisdiction. The court held that Congress had meant section 32(a) to reach conduct outside the United States, and it found jurisdiction over Counts Twelve to Eighteen under that statute, under U.S. treaty obligations and under customary international law principles. On Count Nineteen it held that Yousef had been "found in the United States" within the meaning of section 32(b) even though he was brought there against his will. It also held that the trial court had been wrong to rely on the universality principle, because customary international law did not at that time extend universal jurisdiction to terrorism; jurisdiction was nonetheless proper under section 32, the Montreal Convention and the protective principle.
On sentence the court held that Yousef's and Ismoil's 180-year terms were not unlawful departures above the statutory maximum of life, that Yousef's sentence did not violate the Eighth Amendment, that consecutive sentences did not plainly contravene the sentencing guidelines, and that the $250 million restitution order was not plain error because Yousef had declined to disclose his financial resources to the probation office. It held that it had no jurisdiction over challenges to the Bureau of Prisons' recommendations on conditions of confinement. Ismoil's two consecutive 30-year terms under section 924(c) were upheld against Eighth Amendment and double jeopardy challenges, and his fine and restitution were made payable only if he received income from the sale of his own account of the attack.
By 2013 Yousef was held in a federal prison in Colorado. In February 2013 a challenge brought through his lawyer drew attention to the restrictions on him. It argued that holding him in solitary confinement indefinitely despite good behavior violated his right to due process, and it asked for more current reading material, less intrusive security procedures and transfer to a less restrictive prison. Prison officials said he remained a security threat. In the habeas proceeding in the District of Colorado, Senior District Judge Richard P. Matsch denied Yousef's motion for relief from judgment on June 26, 2014. The court found that the government had a legitimate penological interest in restricting and monitoring his communications, citing his crime and his stated views, and noted that the restrictions are reviewed each year.
In February 2021 he was 52 and serving a life term.
The attack of February 1993 changed how the World Trade Center was run. Underground parking was banned, stairwells were fitted with battery-powered lighting and reflective paint, identification cards were required for workers, and security cameras and vehicle barriers were installed. Tenant companies increased fire drills and other preparations.
Of the men convicted in connection with the 1993 attack, six were in prison in 2018. A seventh suspect had not been taken into custody.
Both of Yousef's trials were held in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, in Manhattan, and Judge Kevin Thomas Duffy presided over both. The U.S. Attorney's office for the district, led by Mary Jo White, prosecuted. The split into an airline case and a World Trade Center case followed the superseding indictment of February 21, 1996, which carried twenty counts in all. The airline counts, brought against three defendants, were tried first, in 1996, and the World Trade Center counts, brought against two, were tried the following year, so that Yousef was convicted in the later case of events that had happened earlier.
The statutes involved were federal. Section 32 of Title 18 deals with offenses against aircraft, section 2332 with the killing of U.S. nationals outside the United States, and section 924(c) with consecutive terms for offenses of a stated kind committed during a violent crime. The two consecutive 30-year terms that make up the last 60 years of the 240-year World Trade Center sentence were imposed under section 924(c). A conspiracy count carried a maximum of life imprisonment, and the most serious World Trade Center counts carried life without parole.
The jurisdictional questions were new. The attack on Flight 434 took place outside the United States, on an aircraft registered in another country, and the man charged with it was brought to the United States from Pakistan. The Second Circuit's opinion of April 4, 2003 held that section 32(a) reaches conduct abroad, that jurisdiction was proper under the protective, objective territorial and passive personality principles of customary international law, and that Yousef was "found in the United States" within the meaning of section 32(b) although he had been brought there involuntarily. It rejected the trial court's reliance on universal jurisdiction, because customary international law did not then extend that principle to terrorism, and upheld the conviction on Count Nineteen under section 32, the Montreal Convention and the protective principle.
The sentence had a practical consequence for his confinement. Because the court had no jurisdiction over the Bureau of Prisons' recommendations on conditions, the question of where and how Yousef would be held was left to the Bureau. Special administrative measures restrict and monitor his communications, and in 2014 the District of Colorado found that the government had a legitimate penological interest in them. They are reviewed every year.
His identity is not settled. Yousef used more than a dozen aliases. Investigators settled on the name Abdul Basit, born in Kuwait in 1968, but they were never fully certain of it, and a critic has argued that the identity papers may belong to another person. Authorities could not establish where he spent most of his early life.
His part in the 1993 attack was argued in two courtrooms. At the 1993 and 1994 trial the prosecution described him as the mastermind of the conspiracy, and the defense argued that the man it represented had been used by him. Yousef himself was not on trial then. At his own trial in 1997 the jury found him guilty on every count, and the Second Circuit affirmed.
1968: Born in Kuwait (date given as April 27).
September 1992: Arrives in New York.
February 26, 1993: Attack on the World Trade Center; six killed, more than 1,000 injured.
March 4, 1993: First arrest in the investigation (Mohammad Salameh).
March 11, 1993: First indictment naming Yousef.
September 1, 1993: Fifth superseding indictment.
September 16, 1993: Trial of four men begins.
March 4, 1994: Four men convicted and later sentenced to 240 years each.
December 11, 1994: Attack on Philippine Airlines Flight 434; Haruki Ikegami, 24, dies.
January 6, 1995: Abdul Hakim Murad arrested in Manila.
February 7, 1995: Yousef arrested in Islamabad.
February 8, 1995: Flown to New York; Justice Department announces the arrest.
April 1995: Murad extradited to the United States.
August 1995: Eyad Ismoil arrested in Jordan.
February 21, 1996: Superseding indictment of twenty counts.
May 29 to September 5, 1996: Airline case tried; guilty on all counts on September 5.
July 15 to November 12, 1997: World Trade Center case tried; guilty on all counts on November 12.
January 8, 1998: Sentenced to 240 years plus life.
April 3, 1998: Ismoil sentenced to 240 years.
May 15, 1998: Murad sentenced to life plus 60 years.
1999: The four men of the first trial resentenced to more than 100 years each.
May 3, 2002: Appeal argued in the Second Circuit.
April 4, 2003: Judgments affirmed, Ismoil's restitution modified.
February 2013: Challenge to his confinement conditions made public.
June 26, 2014: Motion for relief from judgment denied in the District of Colorado.
February 2021: Aged 52, serving a life term.