Ramzi Yousef and accomplices parked a rented van packed with explosives in the North Tower's basement garage and detonated it at 12:18 PM, hoping to topple the tower into its twin. The blast killed six people, injured over a thousand, and carved a seven-story crater, but the towers stood, a warning largely unheeded until 2001.
The bomb makers' ambition was staggering: they wanted to knock the North Tower into the South Tower, collapsing both and killing tens of thousands of people in an instant. Ramzi Yousef, the plot's mastermind, had calculated the trajectory and packed a rented Ryder van with over 1,300 pounds of urea nitrate explosive, enhanced with cyanide gas that investigators later found had simply burned off in the blast rather than poisoning survivors.
At 12:18 PM the bomb detonated in the B-2 level parking garage, tearing a crater roughly 100 feet across and several stories deep, severing power and plunging the towers into darkness and smoke. Six people died, mostly in the immediate blast area, and more than a thousand others were injured, many while stumbling down smoke-filled stairwells for hours.
Yousef fled the country before he could be arrested, evading capture for two years until agents tracked him to Pakistan. He later boasted that his only regret was not using more explosive material. The attack was treated largely as a criminal matter rather than an act of war, and few Americans grasped it as the opening note of a campaign that would return to the same buildings eight years later with far more devastating results.
Key people: Ramzi Yousef