Ramzi Ahmed Yousef (Urdu: رمزی احمد یوسف, romanized: Ramzī Ahmad Yūsuf; born 27 April 1968) is a convicted Pakistani terrorist who was one of the main perpetrators and the mastermind behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing[4][5] and the bombing of Philippine Airlines Flight 434; he was also a co-conspirator in the Bojinka plot.

[9] He received two life sentences plus 240 years for his part in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and Bojinka plot.

[10] He shared a cell block that is commonly referred to as "Bombers' Row" with Terry Nichols, Eric Rudolph, and Ted Kaczynski, before his transfer in late 2021.

[26] Ramzi Yousef sent a letter to The New York Times after the bombing that expressed his motive: We are, the fifth battalion in the Liberation Army, declare our responsibility for the explosion on the mentioned building.

[28] His companion, Ahmed Ajaj, carried multiple immigration documents, among which was a crudely falsified Swedish passport.

Directors of the American Counter-Terrorism program later tied the travel arrangements to a phone call from Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, an Egyptian militant Muslim preacher, to the Pakistani telephone number 810604.

Ajaj never reclaimed the manuals and tapes, which remained at the New York office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) after Judge Reena Raggi had ordered the materials released in December 1992.

He packed four cardboard boxes into the back of the van, each containing a mixture of paper bags, newspapers, urea, and nitric acid; next to them he placed three red metal cylinders of compressed hydrogen.

Four large containers of nitroglycerin were loaded into the center of the van with Atlas Rockmaster blasting caps connected to each.

[32] As a result of the bombing, the FBI added Yousef as the 436th person on its Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list on 21 April 1993.

That summer, he allegedly took up a contract to assassinate the prime minister of Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto, which was initiated by members of Sipah-e-Sahaba.

[citation needed] On 11 December 1994, Yousef conducted a trial run of the plan by boarding Philippine Airlines Flight 434 from Manila to Tokyo, Japan, with a stopover in Cebu.

The explosion tore out a two square-foot (0.2 m2) portion of the cabin floor into the cargo hold but leaving the fuselage of the plane intact.

The airplane was spared from a deadly fiery explosion as the seat where the bomb was planted, 26K, was two rows away from the central fuel tank.

The rapid expansion of energy from the bomb caused the plane to expand vertically slightly, damaging cables to the steering and aileron controls.

The bomb's orientation caused the energy to be mostly absorbed by Ikegami; he was killed but the other passengers and the plane were not catastrophically damaged.

[34] The cockpit crew improvised to manipulate the plane's speed and direction by varying the engines' throttle settings.

Captain Eduardo Reyes made an emergency landing at Okinawa's Naha Airport, saving 272 passengers and 20 crew.

The aircraft became a crime scene under Japanese law; bomb fragments found in and around the blast zone, as well as the lower half of Ikegami's body, provided clues pointing investigators back to Manila.

Weeks before his planned attacks, a fire started in his Manila apartment, forcing him to flee the room, leaving everything behind.

A Philippine National Police raid in another Manila apartment revealed related evidence that Abdul Murad, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and Yousef had drawn up plans for flying an airplane into CIA headquarters.

It included plans to assassinate Pope John Paul II while he visited the Philippines, and to plant bombs inside several United and Delta Air Lines flights out of Bangkok.

Both bombs were timed to blow up over populated areas of the U.S. Parker spent much of the day at the airport, but was reportedly too scared to approach the airlines with the suitcases.

Finally, Parker returned to Yousef's hotel and lied that employees at the airline cargo sections were asking for passports and fingerprints, making it too risky to go ahead with the plan.

[citation needed] Yousef, wanting to get the bombs on a plane bound for the U.S., called a friend with diplomatic immunity in Qatar who was willing to take the suitcases to London and check them on a flight to the U.S.

According to Simon Reeve's book The New Jackals, the name of this friend has not been revealed, but his father is said to be a very senior politician and leading member of the establishment in Qatar (at the time, Yousef's maternal uncle, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was living in Qatar as the guest of a Qatari cabinet official).

[6][7] During the raid, agents found Delta and United Airlines flight schedules and bomb components in children's toys.

[38] During the 1998 trial, Yousef said: You keep talking also about collective punishment and killing innocent people to force governments to change their policies; you call this terrorism when someone would kill innocent people or civilians in order to force the government to change its policies.