Truck Bomb Hits World Trade Center: First Attack

A rented Ryder van packed with 1,200 pounds of urea nitrate explosive detonated in the underground parking garage beneath the World Trade Center's North Tower at 12:17 p.m. on February 26, 1993. The blast carved a crater five stories deep, killed six people, and injured more than a thousand, but it failed spectacularly at its intended purpose: the bombers had hoped to topple the North Tower into the South Tower, killing tens of thousands. The mastermind was Ramzi Yousef, a Pakistani-born militant trained in Afghan camps, who had entered the United States on a fraudulent Iraqi passport six months earlier. Yousef designed the bomb with help from a cell of men connected to the blind Egyptian cleric Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, who preached at a mosque in Jersey City. The group assembled the device in a storage locker, mixing fertilizer-based explosives with compressed hydrogen tanks intended to amplify the blast. They drove the van into the B-2 parking level directly beneath the North Tower. The explosion rocked both towers, knocked out emergency power, filled stairwells with smoke, and trapped tens of thousands of workers in the upper floors for hours. Evacuation took more than nine hours. The six dead included a pregnant woman and a maintenance worker eating lunch near the blast site. Property damage exceeded $500 million. The structural engineers who assessed the aftermath confirmed that the towers had absorbed the explosion as designed — the steel-reinforced concrete foundation held. The FBI traced the plot through a vehicle identification number recovered from the crater, a fragment of the Ryder van's axle. Mohammad Salameh, one of the bombers, was arrested when he returned to the rental agency to reclaim his $400 deposit. Yousef fled to Pakistan but was captured in Islamabad in 1995. The 1993 bombing was the first major jihadist attack on American soil and a direct precursor to September 11, 2001, when the same target was struck again by plotters linked to the same networks. The eight-year gap between attacks was later recognized as a catastrophic failure of intelligence and imagination.