World Trade Center Bombing, New York City – 1993 Management Essay

World Trade Center Bombing, New York City–1993
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World Trade Center Bombing, New York City–1993
The Incident and Historical Background
The World Trade Center Bombing, New York-1993 was a terrorist attack which was executed on the World Trade Center. It was carried out on February 26, 1993 after a truck bomb was detonated below the North Tower of the Center, which is located in New York. The bomb that was used weighed 606 kilograms made from urea nitrate (hydrogen gas) and it was an enhanced device that was used with the aim of ensuring that Tower 1 (North Tower) crashed into Tower 2 (South Tower) so to kill thousands of people (Chemtob, Nomura, & Abramovitz, 2008). However, this was never achieved as it only killed six people and injured slightly over a thousand others.
Terrorist Group(s) Involved and Their Objectives
The attack at the Center was planned and executed by a group of terrorists who included Mahmud Abouhalima, Abdul Rahman Yasin, Ramzi Yousef, Mohammad Salameh, Mahmud Abouhalima, Ahmed Ajaj, and Nidal A. Ayyad. The terrorists were financed by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was Yousef’s uncle. In March 1994, four of the four terrorists were convicted of executing the bombing of the Center; Salameh, Ayyad, Abouhalima, and Ajaj. The court established that their objectives of bombing the Center was to kill thousands of people, which ended up in the death of six and serious and minor injuries to thousands of others. The charges they faced included explosive property destruction, conspiracy, and transportation of explosives from state to state. Later in November 1997, Ramzi Yousef and Eyad Ismoil were convicted. The former was the mastermind fo the bombing of the Center while the latter drove the truck that was ferrying the bomb. Their conviction brought some level of closure to the affected and their families and friends, who believed that finally justice had been served.
The Investigation into the Incident by Federal Authorities
The cause of the bomb blast was not established immediately, leading to suspicion of an explosion of a transformed. However, bomb technicians and agents drawn from FBI, ATF, and the NYPD responded to the scene within the shortest time possible. They excluded a transformer explosive as a possible cause due to the great magnitude of the explosion. The crime scene was then assigned to David Williams, then working with the FBI as the Laboratory Division technician (Pusey, 2016). He claimed that he could tell the size and nature of bomb that had been used even before conducting any scientific tests, but this was contradicted by fellow lab specialists Frederic Whitehurst and Stephen Burmeister. Several days after the bombing, the damage was surveyed by investigators as they looked for possible clues. The FBI deployed around 300 agents to work on the case under the codename TRADEBOM. As they combed through the rubble within the underground parking bay in the Center, one of the bomb technicians identified component fragments that were believed to be from the truck that had been used to deliver the bomb. They found a Vehicle Identification Number (VIN) on a piece retrieved from the axle. This was a major breakthrough in the inve...