John, Robert, Stephen, Bill, Wilfredo, and a pregnant Monica. I can’t list off all the first names of the victims of 9/11, but these are the six people who died when the World Trade Center was first attacked by terrorists eight years previous.
--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: February 26, 1993--
In the shadow of September 11, 2001, many forget that it was not the first time the twin towers were attacked by Islamic extremists. Rather than highjacked aircraft, this attack involved a truck bomb parked underneath the North Tower.
The attack was planned and executed by terrorists from countries across the Middle East and Pakistan, with financing from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a Pakistani member of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda terrorist organization. Mohammed was also the principal architect behind 9/11. He’s currently rotting in Guantanamo and never getting out. So, fuck that guy.
The bomb weighed over 1,300 pounds and was made from various chemicals I won’t bother listing. The intention was for it to be much more horrific than it ended up being. They figured it would cause the North Tower to topple and fall into the South Tower, killing tens of thousands of people, and it’s possible that might have happened had the truck been parked nearer the structure’s poured concrete foundations. Fortunately, when the bomb was detonated just after noon on February 26, 1993, only the six mentioned earlier lost their lives. More than 1,000 others were wounded, mostly during the mass evacuation that followed the blast.
The motivations for the attack were to punish the U.S. for its support of Israel. One of the main perpetrators, a Pakistani named Ramzi Yousef who was also the nephew of the attack’s financier, had sent letters to various media before the bombing calling for America to end its aid to Israel and cease interference in the Middle East. He did not include any religious proclamations regarding his motivation for the bombing.
The bomb had a 20-foot fuse that gave the perpetrators 12 minutes to make their escape. Yousef fled to Pakistan shortly after the bombing, but Pakistani authorities caught the fucker two years later and extradited him to the U.S., where he will remain incarcerated until he breathes his last.
All the perpetrators were caught but one. The fucker in the photo? That’s Abdul Rahman Yusin in 2002. He’s of Iraqi descent but was born in fucking Indiana. He was raised in Iraq and may have acid burns on his right thigh from bomb-making chemicals. If you see him, call the police. The reward for his capture is $5 million.
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