Blind cleric jailed for 1990s terror plots dies in prison
Abdel-Rahman was serving life sentence in N.C.
O ma r A b d e l - R a h ma n , the so-called “Blind Sheik” convicted of plotting terror attacks in the United States in the 1990s, died Saturday in a federal prison where he was serving a life sentence. He was 78.
Abdel-Rahman, who had diabetes and coronary artery disease, died at the Federal Correction Complex in Butner, N.C., where he had been for seven years, a pri son spokesman said.
Abdel-Rahman was a key spiritual leader for a generation of Islamic militants and became a symbol for radicals during two decades in American prisons.
B l i n d s i n c e i n f a n c y, A b d e l - R a h ma n w a s t h e leader of one of Egypt’s most feared militant groups, the Gamaa Islamiya, which led a campaign of violence aimed at bringing down ex-President Hosni Mubarak.
Abdel-Rahman fled Egypt to the U.S. in 1990 and began teaching in a New Jersey mosque. Some 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 airliner attack brought the towers down.
Later in 1993, Abdel-Rahman was arrested by authorities who accused him and others of conspiring to wage a string of bombings against the United Nations and other New York landmarks, including the George Washington Bridge and the Lincoln and Holland tunnels.
His Gamaa Islamiya, which led a wave of violence in the 1990s, was crushed a decade ago, and its leaders, jailed in Egypt, declared a truce.
Abdel-Rahman’s ac tivities 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 over the past two decades.
Born in the Egyptian Nile Delt a village of al- Gamalia in 1938, Abdel-Rahman attended Cairo’s Al-Azhar University, a center of Islamic scholarship, and then began preaching as an imam in a mosque in the oasi s of Fayyoum just south of Cairo. He quickly ran into trouble as he turned toward a radical “takfir” ideology — a radical interpretation of Islam that holds that those who don’t follow a strict version of Islamic Sharia law are “kafirs” or “infidels.”
Before moving to the U.S., Abdel-Rahman traveled to Afghanistan and Pakistan, where he became a spiritual leader for the mujahedeen, then fighting Soviet troops with help from the Central Intelligence Agency.
Abdel-Rahman arrived in the United States in 1990, even though he was on a list of suspected terrorists and thus banned from the country. He was given permanent residence status under the name Omar Ahmed Ali.
Abdel-Rahman had two wives and 13 children.