Sunday marked the 30th anniversary of the first World Trade Center bombing, masterminded by Ramzi Yousef — an illegal alien stopped at JFK when he tried to enter without documents (and the documents he did have were fraudulent), only to be released for lack of detention space after making a bogus asylum claim.
The First World Trade Center Bombing.
Thirty years is a long time, and most millennials are likely unaware that there even was a World Trade Center bombing prior to the destruction of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001.
As the 9/11 Commission Report explained: “Yousef`s instant notoriety as the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing inspired” his uncle, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), “to become involved in planning attacks against the United States.
A quick search revealed the van had been rented and reported stolen the day before the bombing, and when Mohammad Salameh, who had rented the van, went to get his $400 deposit back six days later, the FBI quickly arrested him.
Yousef, however, fled the United States to Pakistan the day of the bombing, using a Pakistani passport issued under the name “Abdul Basit Karim”.
He eventually made his way to Afghanistan, where he studied bomb-making techniques at a terrorist camp in Khalden, finishing up just before the February 1993 attack.
Yousef and Ajaj were poster children for a key point in the 9/11 Commission staff report on terrorist travel: “Once terrorists had entered the United States, their next challenge was to find a way to remain here.
Yousef presented himself to an inspector named Martha Morales, handing her a boarding pass in the name of “Mohammed Azan” and an Iraqi passport.
The passport lacked the entry visa Yousef would have needed for admission, and so he told Morales “he was fleeing the oppressive regime of Saddam Hussein and needed asylum.
Yousef claimed he had paid a corrupt Pakistani official for the boarding pass (a common claim in airport asylum cases), and that “he had recently been beaten by Iraqi soldiers when he was in Kuwait because they thought he was a member of a Kuwaiti guerrilla organization” — a story the 9/11 staff described as “bogus”.
Upon searching Yousef`s belongings, Morales found “an identity card from an Islamic organization in Arizona, along with checks from Lloyd`s Bank of London and an address book listing what Morales would later call `unusual places [in the United States] for someone to visit whom had just come from halfway around the world.
`” Morales charged Yousef with excludability for attempting to make an illegal entry into the United States.
In Yousef`s case, that meant detention pending an exclusion proceeding before an immigration judge to determine whether he was admissible and, if not admissible, eligible for asylum.
The inspector recommended Yousef be detained, believing that “he might pose a danger to the United States”.
https://cis.org/Arthur/Thirty-Years-after-First-World-Trade-Center-Bombing
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