Ramzi Yousef is arrested in Islamabad

Ramzi Yousef was among the principal planners of the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York on 26 February 1993, and was later linked to a plot to bomb US airliners over the Pacific^1,2. After the 1993 attack he fled the United States and became one of the FBI’s most wanted fugitives.

In early 1995 an associate contacted the US embassy in Islamabad offering information. Acting on it, agents of the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service, working with the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration and Pakistani authorities, arrested Yousef at a guest house in Islamabad on 7 February 1995^1,2. Pakistan handed him over within days, and he was flown to New York³.

Yousef was convicted in two federal trials and sentenced to life imprisonment³. The arrest showed that, despite the Pressler sanctions, Pakistani and American security agencies could cooperate effectively against terrorism. It also drew attention to Pakistan as a transit point for militants who had passed through the Afghan war, a concern that grew through the decade. Some in Pakistan criticised the speed of the handover, which took place without a formal extradition process, a pattern repeated in the Kansi case in 1997.