‘ Blind Sheik’ convicted of NYC bomb conspiracy
Omar Abdel- Rahman, the so- called Blind Sheik convicted of plotting terror attacks in New York City in the decade before 9/ 11 and spiritual guide to a generation of Islamic militants, has died in a federal prison. He was 78.
Abdel- Rahman, who had diabetes and coronary artery disease, died Saturday at the Federal Correction Complex in Butner, North Carolina, said its acting executive assistant, Kenneth McKoy. The inmate spent seven years at the prison medical facility while serving a life sentence.
“We are saddened by your departure, father,” the cleric’s daughter, Asmaa, tweeted in Arabic.
Abdel- Rahman was a key spiritual leader for militants and became a symbol for radicals during his decades in U. S. prisons, where his captivity inspired plots, protests and calls for violence. The only person charged in the U. S. in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Zacarias Moussaoui, had said he was training for a mission to fly a jet into the White House if the government refused to free Abdel- Rahman.
Blind since infancy from diabetes, Abdel- Rahman was the leader of one of Egypt’s most feared militant groups, the Gamaa Islamiya, or the “Islamic Group,” which at its height led a campaign of violence aimed at toppling that country’s onetime president, Hosni Mubarak.
Abdel- Rahman fled Egypt to the U. S. in 1990 and began teaching in a New Jersey mosque. A circle of his followers were convicted in the Feb. 26, 1993, truck bombing of New York’s World Trade Center that killed six people — eight years before al- Qaida’s suicide plane hijackers brought the towers down.
Later in 1993, Abdel- Rahman was charged and later convicted as the leader of a group that conspired to bomb the United Nations and other New York landmarks, including the George Washington Bridge and the Lincoln and Holland tunnels.
Those attacks were never carried out, but U. S. District Judge Michael Mukasey, who later became attorney general, told the defendants at sentencing that if the plot hadn’t been thwarted, it would have: “brought about devastation on a scale that beggars the imagination, certainly on a scale unknown in this country since the Civil War.”
Abdel- Rahman was also convicted of plotting to assassinate Mubarak.
Defense lawyer Ron Kuby, who once represented the sheik, said Abdel- Rahman’s war was with a corrupt Egyptian government and he believes there was insufficient evidence to link him to the New York plots.
“I’m not in any way defending his vision,” Kuby said. “He was an Islamist, he believed in Sharia law and that’s what he wanted to see in Egypt. But he bore no malice toward the United States or the American people.”
Since his imprisonment, Abdel- Rahman’s influence had been seen as more symbolic than that of a practical leader. His Gamaa Islamiya, which led a wave of violence in the 1990s against Western tourists, Egyptian police and Coptic Christians, was eventually crushed, and its leaders — jailed in Egypt — declared a truce.
Abdel- Rahman’s activities pre- dated Osama bin Laden’s formation of al- Qaida in the late 1990s. But he was an influential figure in the generation of Islamic extremists that emerged from Egypt in recent decades.
Even though Abdel- Rahman was on a list of suspected terrorists and thus banned from the U. S., he managed to enter the country in 1990 because of a bureaucratic blunder. He was given permanent residence status under the name Omar Ahmed Ali.
Abdel- Rahman had two wives and 13 children.
One of his sons, Ahmed, was killed by a U. S. drone strike in 2011 in Afghanistan, where he was fighting U. S. and NATO forces.