At 12:18 p.m. on this day, a terrorist bomb exploded in a parking garage of the World Trade Center in New York City, leaving a crater 60 feet wide and causing the collapse of several steel-reinforced concrete floors in the vicinity of the blast.
Although the terrorist bomb failed to critically damage the main structure of the skyscrapers, six people were killed and more than 1,000 were injured.
The World Trade Center itself suffered more than $500 million in damage. After the attack, authorities evacuated 50,000 people from the buildings, hundreds of whom were suffering from smoke inhalation. The evacuation lasted the whole afternoon.
The mastermind of the attack -- Ramzi Ahmed Yousef -- remained at large until February 1995, when he was arrested in Pakistan. He had previously been in the Philippines, and a computer he left there contained terrorist plans that included a plot to kill Pope John Paul II and a plan to bomb 15 American airliners in 48 hours.
On the flight back to the United States, Yousef reportedly admitted to a Secret Service agent that he had directed the Trade Center attack from the beginning and even claimed to have set the fuse that exploded the 1,200-pound bomb.
His only regret, the agent quoted Yousef saying, was that the 110-story tower did not collapse into its twin as planned -- a catastrophe that would have caused thousands of deaths.
After the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, U.S. investigators began to suspect that Yousef had ties to Saudi exile Osama bin Laden, the head of the anti-U.S. al-Qaeda terrorist network.
Whether bin Laden was in fact involved in the 1993 twin tower attacks has not been determined, but on Sept. 11, 2001, two groups of al-Qaeda terrorists finished the job begun by Yousef, crashing two hijacked airliners into the north and south tower of the World Trade Center.
Source: History.com
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