Omar Abdel Rahman: From village along Nile to death in US federal prison

NEW YORK: Omar Abdel Rahman, the Egyptian-born jihadist linked to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, died of natural causes at 9:40 a.m. (1440 GMT) on Saturday at the Federal Medical Center, Butner, part of a federal prison compound in Butner, North Carolina, according to Greg Norton, a spokesman.
The convicted terrorist, who was born in a village along the Nile on May 3, 1938, lost his eyesight due to childhood diabetes and grew up studying a Braille version of literature.
As an adult he became associated with a radical group and was imprisoned and accused of issuing a fatwa leading to the 1981 assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, against whom he had railed for years. He said he was hung upside-down from the ceiling, beaten with sticks and given electric shocks while held but he was eventually acquitted and went into self-imposed exile in 1990.
He managed to get to New York after the US Embassy in Sudan granted him a tourist visa in 1990 — despite the fact that he was on the State Department’s list of people with ties to terror groups.
US authorities blamed a computer error for the visa, but the mistake was compounded in 1991 when Abdel Rahman was given a green card and permanent US resident status. The New York Times reported the CIA had approved the visa application for Abdel Rahman, who had supported the anti-Soviet fighters in Afghanistan during the 1980s.
Abdel Rahman lived in the New York City borough of Brooklyn and nearby Jersey City, New Jersey. Even in exile, he remained a force in the Middle East, where followers listened to cassette tapes and radio broadcasts of his sermons.
While in the US, Abdel Rahman and his disciples were linked to the 1990 slaying in New York of militant Rabbi Meir Kahane, the 1992 killing of a liberal writer in Egypt and attacks on foreign tourists there.
US authorities took action in 1992 by revoking Abdel Rahman’s green card on the grounds that he had lied about a bad check charge in Egypt and about having two wives when he entered the country. He was facing the possibility of deportation when a truck bomb went off in the basement parking garage of the World Trade Center on Feb. 26, 1993, killing six people and injuring more than 1,000 in an attack that made Americans realize that they were not immune to international terrorism.
Four months later Abdel Rahman was arrested and went on trial with several of his followers in 1995, accused of plotting a day of terror for the US — assassinations and synchronized bombings of the UN headquarters, a major federal government facility in Manhattan and tunnels and a bridge linking New York City and New Jersey.
The indictment said Abdel Rahman and his followers planned to “levy a war of urban terrorism against the United States” as part of a holy war to stop US support for Israel and change its overall Middle East policy. The defendants were not directly charged with the 1993 World Trade Center attack but were convicted of conspiring with those who did carry out the bombing.
Abdel Rahman’s convictions also included plotting to kill Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak during a visit to the US in 1993, a Jewish New York state legislator and a Jewish New York State Supreme Court justice.
Much of the case against him and his followers was based on video and audio recordings made with the help of a bodyguard for Abdel Rahman who became an FBI informant. A video also showed four defendants mixing fertilizer and diesel fuel for bombs.
After a nine-month trial, Abdel Rahman and nine followers were found guilty in October 1995 on 48 of 50 charges.
He did not testify at his trial but at a sentencing hearing Abdel Rahman gave a speech of more than 90 minutes through a translator, proclaiming his innocence and denouncing the US as an enemy.
In 2006 one of Abdel Rahman’s lawyers, Lynne F. Stewart, was sentenced to 28 months in prison for helping smuggle messages from him to his followers in Egypt.
Abdel Rahman was still an important figure among radicals even after years in prison.
A year before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in New York, Osama bin Laden had pledged a war to free Abdel Rahman from prison.
In 2012, former Egyptian President Muhammad Mursi, a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, said winning his freedom would be a priority. The militants who attacked an Algerian oilfield and took hostages in 2013 also demanded his release.