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By Root 987 0

a visa by the US embassy in Sudan—preached. Egyptian requests for his extradition had been refused. Yousef and the sheikh spoke several times on the phone. Yousef recruited a small team of migrant ne’er-do-wells and set about manufacturing sixteen hundred pounds of explosives from commercially purchased chemicals, designed to blow up the World Trade Center. It took three weeks of mixing, spreading and drying, to assemble enough explosives for a gigantic bomb which was kept in rental storage. The detonation system was trickier, so much so that Yousef actually phoned Ajaj in prison to see if he could help. Other comical moments occurred when three of the bombers were almost killed after their car careered out of control late one night, hospitalising Yousef, who nonetheless ordered more chemicals from his hospital bed. The driver, Mohammed Salameh, even though he had failed his test four times, and even though his visa had expired, successfully rented a Ryder van for which he put down a US$400 deposit. In one of his few sentient acts, he even remembered to rent one that would clear the height barriers. Hell bent on collapsing both towers so as to kill a quarter of a million people, Yousef added one last refinement to his ammonium-nitrate and fuel-oil bomb. These were four cylinders of hydrogen gas, intended to propel the initial blast further forwards.

On 26 October 1993, Yousef and a Jordanian, Eyad Ismoil, parked the truck in the basement of the World Trade Center, where it detonated shortly after noon. The blast went through three floors down and two floors up, killing six people, building workers having lunch, and injuring more than a thousand. Yousef flew to Karachi that night while Ismoil took a flight to Jordan. Salameh hung around, brooding about his US$400 deposit. By the time he went to claim it, haggling the sum up from zero to US$200 with an undercover FBI agent, FBI forensic experts had identified the truck used to house the bomb. He was arrested after he left the rental office. Although the attack had killed six and caused half a billion dollars’ worth of structural damage, the jihadists around the blind sheikh were not satisfied. Urging them on to greater depravities was the imprisoned Egyptian El-Sayyid Nosair, serving seven years for assassinating the fanatic rabbi Meir Kahane in 1990. Osama bin Laden had paid his legal bills. A motley group, eventually numbering eleven, resolved to blow up the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels into Manhattan. Cars, bomb-making materials and timers were acquired. Justification was sought from sheikh Omar, unaware that one of the key conspirators worked for the FBI and that all of the group were under electronic surveillance. A long series of trials put several of these men, including the sheikh, in jail for the rest of their lives. One of the sheikh’s defence lawyers would more recently follow him behind bars for colluding in passing messages from his prison.

These events had no direct connection with bin Laden save that the master bomber had been through his training programme, and he has vowed to wreak havoc if and when the elderly sheikh finally expires from the multiple illnesses he is afflicted by. Refusing medication, the sheikh scoffs immense quantities of fast food from prison canteens so that his diabetes and high blood pressure may expedite this murderous outcome. In 1995 al-Zawahiri’s expatriate campaign of terror in Egypt led to the ejection of the entire al-Jihad group from Sudan. Aided by Sudanese intelligence officers, al-Zawahiri conspired to assassinate Hosni Mubarak as he attended an African Unity conference in Addis Ababa. The plan—referred to above in the context of Bosnia—was to kill him as his motorcade drove from the airport into the capital, using teams of shooters equipped with RPGs and automatic rifles. The plot failed, although not before two Egyptian bodyguards had been killed, as Mubarak sped by.

The Egyptian government lashed out at Islamist sympathisers, commissioning five new prisons to house them. Its intelligence agencies decided to strike directly