Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Blind Sheik, behind 1990s N.Y. 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, 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 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.