The Killing of Rabbi Kahane: Jihad in America

Lesson Learned

Ramzi Yusef (AP)

Within a year, following two trials, most of the conspirators were behind bars. Nosair was sentenced to life in prison. So was Rahman. The others faced sentences ranging from 45 to 85 years in prison. But Yusef, who, it would later be discovered, was the blood uncle of Khalid Mohammed, the alleged mastermind between the Al Qaeda network's September 11, 2001, attack that finally toppled the Word Trade Center and damaged the Pentagon, had escaped. Yusef would remain at large for the next two years before finally being captured by authorities in Pakistan. He was returned to the United States and in 1998 he was sentenced to 240 years in prison.

The faces of Khalid Shaik Mohammed (AP)

In the months that followed the convictions of Nosair and the followers of the Blind Sheik, chastened authorities vowed that they had taken to heart the message of the Kahane killing, a message articulated by Boaz Ganor, director of Israel's International Policy Institute for Counter-terrorism, in an interview with the Jerusalem Post. As Ganor put it at the time, "It is more than conceivable that the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center would have been averted if the Kahane assassination had been treated as a terrorist act and not as an isolated case by a lone gunman."

But there are indications that, even afterwards, clues to possible future terrorist attacks continued to elude authorities. For example, when Ramzi Yusef was arrested in Pakistan in 1995, two years after the truck bombing at the World Trade Center and six years before a pair of hijacked airliners would destroy the Twin Towers, authorities pulled from his pockets some papers. Among them, in a hasty scrawl, were the nascent plans to hijack U.S. airliners and use them as flying bombs, authorities said.

Plane crashing into World Trade Center Tower (AP)