SEE YOU IN HELL!
Blind sheik dies in jail
OMAR ABDEL-RAHMAN, the blind sheik who masterminded the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, died Saturday at a North Carolina prison hospital, officials said.
The 78-year-old Egyptian cleric passed away of natural causes inside the Federal Medical Center in Butner about 5:40 a.m., officials said.
Abdel-Rahman, who suffered from diabetes and coronary artery disease, was transferred to Butner in February 2007 after spending several years at a Supermax federal prison in Colorado, officials said.
“Allah has taken the soul of Sheik Omar,” his daughter Asmaa Abdel-Rahman tweeted in Arabic.
Alex di Giovanni, whose brother-in-law John di Giovanni died in the 1993 Trade Center attacks, offered a far different reaction to Abdel-Rahman’s death.
“I viewed him as a radical nut job,” she said. “He died in prison where he belonged.”
Years before the American public learned about Osama Bin Laden, Abdel-Rahman was the face of Islamic terrorism.
A Manhattan federal jury convicted the radical cleric in 1995 of masterminding a foiled plot to blow up the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, the United Nations and the FBI’s New York headquarters.
The FBI had busted AbdelRahman and nine conspirators inside a Queens safe house where they were stirring a brew of harmless chemicals they falsely believed could obliterate a city block.
Prosecutors said the ultimate purpose of Abdel-Rahman’s “war of urban terrorism” was to force the U.S. to abandon its support for Israel and Egypt.
In what was the biggest terrorism case in U.S. history at the time, the jurors also convicted El Sayed Nosair, one of Abdel-Rahman’s followers, in the 1990 slaying of militant Rabbi Meir Kahane, who was shot to death in a Manhattan hotel. Abdel-Rahman was sentenced in 1996 to life in prison.
In a rambling, 100-minute statement at his sentencing, the unrepentant terrorist called on his Muslim followers to rise up against an “infidel” America. “America will go and be withered and this civilization will be destroyed,” Abdel-Rahman said in Manhattan Federal Court. “Nothing will remain. We will not kneel.”
“The prosecution wants that we should kneel and be subservient to America and obey America,” he added, “but we do not kneel to anyone, except to God.”
The 1993 World Trade Center attack killed six people and injured more than 1,000 others.
Abdel-Rahman was never charged in the plot but prosecutors maintained that he conspired with the six men convicted in the bombing.
Born in a small village near the
Nile and blind from infancy due to diabetes, Abdel-Rahman grew up studying a Braille version of the Koran, according to Reuters.
A charismatic speaker and outspoken foe of Egypt’s secular government, he was revered by members of two of the nation’s most feared militant groups — Gamaa Islamiya and Egyptian Islamic Jihad.
Abdel-Rahman’s followers carried out bomb attacks around the world and killed people they viewed as enemies of Islam.
He spent three years behind bars on charges he issued a fatwa resulting in the 1981 assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.
Abdel-Rahman dodged a conviction but Egyptian authorities opted to kick him out of the country anyway.
He arrived in the U.S. in 1990 after the American Embassy in Sudan inexplicably granted him a tourist visa. Abdel-Rahman was at the time flagged on a State Department list of people with terror ties.
Despite U.S. officials acknowledging the error, they outdid their own incompetence the following year when he was given a green card and permanent U.S. resident status.
Abdel-Rahman settled down in New York and started preaching at a Jersey City mosque, amassing followers in the U.S. and extending his influence around the world.
The 1993 bombing shattered the American perception that terror attacks only take place overseas. Abdel-Rahman was arrested four months later.
In addition to his conviction for the planned bombing rampage, he was also found guilty of plotting to murder Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, a Jewish New York state legislator and a Jewish New York State Supreme Court justice.
In sentencing the sheik, thenManhattan Federal Court Judge Michael Mukasey pointed out that if he had pulled off the second, grander scheme, it “would have made the World Trade Center seem almost insignificant by comparison.”
Even from behind bars, Abdel-Rahman sought to direct his followers to carry out terror attacks.
His lawyer, Lynne Stewart, was convicted in 2004 of aiding terrorists by relaying messages from the jailed sheik.
Abdel-Rahman’s death prompted a flood of celebratory messages on social media — some cruder than others. “One less a----e in the world,” tweeted international affairs analyst Thomas Sorlie.
But not everyone cheered his death.
“I know well that the sheik’s view of a proper society is anathema to the liberal, constitutional democracy that I cherish and fight to uphold,” said lawyer Ron Kuby, who briefly represented Abdel-Rahman. “But that did not make him a criminal deserving of death in an American cage.”