Abdel-Rahman, cleric behind ’90s terror plots, dies in prison
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, N.C., 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. 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.
Influential figure
Abdel-Rahman was the leader of one of Egypt’s most feared militant groups, the Gamaa Islamiya, or the “Islamic Group.”
Abdel-Rahman fled Egypt 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 arrested by authorities who accused him and others of conspiring 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.
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 predated 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 in recent decades.
Born in the Egyptian Nile Delta village of al-Gamalia in 1938, Abdel-Rahman was blind by the age of 10 months. Still, he said in his autobiography that he memorized Islam’s holy book, the Quran, by age 11.
He attended Cairo’s Al-Azhar University, a center of Islamic scholarship, and then began preaching as an imam in a mosque just south of Cairo.
He quickly ran into trouble as he turned toward a radical interpretation of Islam that holds that those who don’t follow a strict version of Islamic Sharia law are infidels.
Entered U.S. on blunder
Before moving to the U.S., Abdel-Rahman travelled to Afghanistan and Pakistan, where he became a spiritual leader for the mujahedeen, then fighting Soviet troops with help from the Central Intelligence Agency.
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.