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| Timothy McVeigh, Terry Nichols, and Ramzi Yousef (Part 5) |
| 2004-03-14 |
| I wrote this. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 Ramzi Yousef grew up in a Pakistani-Palestinian family in Kuwait. His family moved back to Pakistan in 1986, but he soon moved to England to study electrical engineering. He moved back to Pakistan in 1991 and immersed himself in the network of guesthouses and camps there that housed and trained terrorists from many foreign countries. He used his education to teach bomb-making skills. It was then and there that he met a Filipino Moslem who invited him to teach for a while in the southern, Moslem area of the Philippines. Yousef spent several months there and then returned to Pakistan in mid-1992 and resumed teaching there. During this period he met a West-Bank Palestinian named Ahmed Mohammed Ajaj. Back in 1988 in Palestine, Ajaj had been arrested by the Israeli police and was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in an Israeli prison. He served only one year of that sentence, apparently because he agreed to work as an informant for Israeli intelligence. Ajaj was soon arrested again and was "deported" (his name is not listed with other deported persons) in April 1991 and so became involved with radical Moslem groups abroad. After a while in Pakistan, this convicted counterfeiter of US currency was granted a visa to enter the United States, using his true name, on September 9, 1991. He settled in Houston, Texas, applied for political asylum, and worked for a pizzeria. Just seven months later, in April 1992, he left the United States, traveling with a false name, and returned to Pakistan. There he where he met Yousef and agreed to accompany him back to the United States for the purpose of exploding terrorist bombs. They flew into the United States, Ajaj traveling under a false name and with a Swedish passport, on September 1, 1992. Ajaj was immediately arrested at the airport on September 1, 1992, and then imprisoned. Customs officials found bomb-making manuals in Ajajs’ luggage and confiscated them. Ajaj maintained indirect but regular telephone contact from prison, however, with Yousef during the following five months as the latter prepared to bomb the World Trade Center. Ajaj and Yousef communicated through telephone message relayed through a friend (I have never seen his name publicly identified) who operated the Big Five Hamburger stand in Balch Springs, a Dallas suburb. In mid-November 1992, Yousef and a few of his New York collaborators began making telephone calls to various companies in order to try to buy the materials that would be used to manufacture their bombs. After they achieved initial successes in that effort, Yousef intensified his contacts with Ajaj, beginning in early December, in order to try to obtain Ajaj’s confiscated bomb-making manuals because Yousef needed some precise details from them. On December 29, 1992, a call from Ajaj was transferred to Yousef, permitting the two to speak directly. (The call was recorded by, at least, the prison administration.) In the conversation, Ajaj immediately brought up the terrorist kit informing Yousef that the Court had ordered the Government to return Ajaj’s belongings. When Yousef asked if he could take possession of Ajaj’s things, Ajaj readily agreed at first. He then said that it was not a good idea for Yousef personally to obtain the materials from the Government because it might jeopardize Yousef’s "business," which, Ajaj said, would be "a pity!" As Ajaj well knew, Yousef’s only "business" in the United States was to pursue the bomb plot the two conspirators had hatched together overseas earlier that year. Ajaj then suggested that Yousef send someone else to pick up the materials. The outcome of that suggestion is not publicly known. In December 1992 Yousef called Eyad Ismoil, who was living in Dallas, Texas. Subsequently, on February 22, 1993, Ismoil joined Yousef in New York. Yousef and Ismoil supervised the driving of the bomb-laden truck to the World Trade Center on February 26, and then they both flew away from the United States later that same day. ========= During the late summer and fall of 1992, Timothy McVeigh’s life became extraordinarily depressed. He was stuck working as a security guard near Niagra Falls, New York. He became a recluse and dropped out of the National Guard. He checked into a veteran’s hospital, complaining of a skin rash and filed a claim for benefits due to Gulf War Syndrom. Then in November, his old friend Terry Nichols, along with his wife Marife, traveled from Decker, Michigan, to visit him for a week. That same month, McVeigh called another dealer, William Pfaff to inform him that he could now provide some blast simulators that Pfaff had requested several months later. In addition, McVeigh told Pfaff, he could also supply antidotes for chemical weapons. A few weeks later, McVeigh quit his security-guard job and, now full of vitality and plans, devoted himself entirely to selling weapon-related equipment at gun shows. Meanwhile, Terry and Marife Nichols flew to the Philippines and spent the month of January there. Terry supposedly tried to set up some kind of business there but changed his mind, so the family returned to the United States in early February, 1993. |
| Posted by:Mike Sylwester |