The Killing of Rabbi Kahane: Jihad in America

America Under Attack

February 23, 1993, was a gray mid-winter day with a stiff, chilly breeze blowing across New York's harbor and sending trash flying in the canyons of lower Manhattan. The workday sidewalks were snarled with pedestrians rushing to their jobs in the financial district, and the streets around the World Trade Center were jammed with taxis and vans and box trucks of every description. No one paid any heed to the yellow rented Ryder truck as it pulled into the basement parking garage at the World Trade Center.

At 12:18 p.m., a massive blast ripped through the garage. Fifteen hundred pounds of homemade explosives had been crammed into the back of the rented truck. When the smoke cleared six people were dead, 1,000 were injured, and the notion that America, isolated between two oceans, was somehow safe was permanently erased.

Smoke-filled World Trade Center garage after bombing (AP)

In fact, authorities would later say, the attack could have been worse. The conspirators had hoped that the blast would have been powerful enough to buckle the gigantic pylons that supported the towers, leading to its collapse. The plotters also tried, authorities said, to turn the rented truck into a crude chemical bomb, lacing the explosives with cyanide. The cyanide, authorities would later note with relief, was incinerated when the bomb exploded.

Even then, as America staggered under the realization that its security had been suddenly shattered, there was a very good chance that the Islamic terrorist conspiracy that had engineered the attack would escape detection. At first, authorities suspected that the bombing had been the work of some shadowy Serbian nationalist group, angered by American intervention in the Balkans. In fact, a few months earlier, they had again stumbled across a piece of information that could have indicated the horror to come, when two of the conspirators entered the country, disembarking from a flight from Pakistan at New York City's JFK International Airport. The pair, Ramzi Yusef and Ahmed Ajaj, were traveling under false passports, passports not unlike the bogus documents that authorities had found in Nosair's apartment after the Kahane slaying. Customs officials spotted Ajaj's false papers and he was detained. But Yusef, who was to become one of the prime movers in the World Trade Center bombing, managed to slip quietly into the country.

Ramzi Yusef (AP)

For his part, Ajaj kept his mission secret.

It might have remained so, federal authorities would later say, if not for a fluke. Two days after the massive blast at the World Trade Center, a keen-eyed investigator for the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms spotted chemical residue on the twisted wreckage of the Ryder van, a piece that miraculously still had the vehicle identification number intact. Then authorities were able to piece together the truth.

Within a few days, authorities were able to trace the Ryder truck back to a rental center in Jersey City, just a few blocks from the second-floor mosque where Sheik Omar Abdul Rahman preached. As it turned out the truck had been rented a few days before the blast by Mohammed Salameh, a 25-year-old Palestinian with a thick black beard and a degree in Islamic law from a university in Jordan. It was the same Mohammed Salameh who spent his summer mornings in the late 1980s taking target practice with Nosair at the Calverton shooting range.

In the years since, much has been made of the fact that Salameh had reported the van stolen and twice returned to the rental center to reclaim his $400 deposit. Observers have speculated that it was an indication of stupidity on the part of the conspirators, but authorities have long acknowledged that the move was carefully calculated. The odds that anyone would find any part of the truck were slim. The odds that they would find a piece that would lead them back to Salameh were smaller still. Salameh's insistence on getting his deposit back was, authorities believe, an effort to deflect suspicion.

Salameh was the first man arrested in the probe into the World Trade Center bombing. He was far from the last.

As the investigators followed the thread back from Salameh, they began to uncover the crude outlines of a vast and wide-ranging conspiracy, an international conspiracy that two years earlier they had scoffed at.

What they found was a shadowy terrorist army, an army that included Clement Hampton-el and in which Nosair, the supposedly deranged gunman who managed to escape a murder conviction for his role in the death of Kahane, was a leading light. Among their plans, allegedly discussed and honed in the visiting rooms at Attica and in the hallways of the Majid Al Salaam mosque in Jersey City, was the blueprint for a "Day of Terror". Slated to begin in June of 1993, the attack was set to target perhaps thousands of innocent people in simultaneous attacks on the United Nations complex, and on the Lincoln and Holland tunnels leading from New Jersey to New York.

Within the next few weeks, authorities would begin to track down the conspirators one at a time. On March 9, Ajaj was charged with taking part in the planning of the attack; a few days later, Abuhalima, Abu the Red, was arrested in Egypt and returned to the United States. By the end of spring, authorities had identified more than a dozen radical Muslim conspirators, led, authorities charged, by the Blind Sheik. Among them, they alleged, was Nosair. At his trial, authorities finally managed to make the link between the Kahane slaying and the terrorist campaign which was to follow it.

In the trial in which Nosair, Rahman and 10 others were convicted, authorities at last concluded that "the attack on Rabbi Kahane did not occur in a vacuum." It was, prosecutors wrote in court documents "a small albeit brutal step in a terrorist campaign which comprehended not only assassinations of individuals but the mass destruction of political, social and economic assets of the 'infidel' west of which the United States was deemed the leader."

"The crimes," the prosecution continued, "are not random, disconnected acts of unthinking brutality. They are, instead, all parts of the same very real battle the defendants and their co-conspirators saw and still see themselves fighting."