by The World Trade Center, located in the heart of Manhattan in New York City, was built in 1966 and immediately became an iconic landmark for the city.
The Twin Towers, as they were called, were over 1,360 feet above the ground — 110 floors each.
On this day in history, February 26, 1993, the World Trade Center was bombed – injuring more than 1,000 people.
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It was a winter day on Monday, February 26, 1993, just like any other in New York, cold and windy, as thousands of people went to work, according to many reports.
About 50,000 people were inside the World Trade Center complex – more than 40,000 of them in the Twin Towers – according to the 9/11 Memorial website.
A bomb exploded in the World Trade Center parking garage in 1993. (David Handschuh/NY Daily News Archives via Getty Images)
At around 12:00 pm, a group of terrorists, including a man named Ramzi Yousef, drove a van into the public parking garage under the Towers.
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The van exploded about 17 minutes after noon — creating a 100-foot crater inside the north tower, according to the FBI’s website.
Six people were killed near the site of the bomb almost immediately: John DiGiovanni, Robert Kirkpatrick, Stephen A. Knapp, William Macko, Wilfredo Mercado and Monica Rodriguez Smith.
Hundreds of people were treated for smoke inhalation and broken bones after the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in Manhattan. (Ken Murray/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images)
Stock trader Timothy Lang was parking his car in the garage when the bomb exploded.
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“I was physically lifted off my feet and thrown through the air … My whole body was compressed as if completely pressed,” he said in memory of the 9/11 Memorial Museum.
Hundreds of people were injured from smoke inhalation and broken bones.
The bombing happened around noon on February 26, 1993, in the heart of New York City. (David Handschuh/NY Daily News Archives via Getty Images)
It was Ramzi Yousef who had come to New York nearly five and a half months earlier after learning how to make a bomb in Afghanistan, according to the 9/11 Memorial.
He was working with six other terrorists.
He visited the World Trade Center several times before the attack, the 9/11 Memorial reports.
Yousef was later arrested in February 1995 and convicted two years later.
In July 1993, the State Department offered a $2 million reward for information leading to Yousef’s arrest, according to the US State Department website.
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By this time, Yousef had gone underground.
“U.S. law enforcement officials believed Yousef had fled to Pakistan, but had little reliable information on his location,” the State Department website notes.
Yousef was later arrested in February 1995 and convicted two years later, the FBI website says.
The World Trade Center was bombed on February 26, 1993, in a horrific attack on the iconic Manhattan site. (Ken Murray/David Handschuh/NY Daily News Archives via Getty Images)
This would not be the only attack on the Twin Towers, however.
Nearly 3,000 people were killed on September 11, 2001, in terrorist attacks that shocked the world and prompted major US initiatives to fight terrorism, notes History.com.
The 1993 attack on the World Trade Center was a deadly precursor to the major attacks of 2001.
“We later learned from Yousef that his Trade Center plot was much more sinister,” the FBI notes.
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“He wanted the bomb to take down one tower, and the falling debris to knock down the second.”
The site continues, “The attack turned out to be a deadly dress rehearsal for 9/11; with the help of Yousef’s uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, al-Qaeda later returned to fulfill Yousef’s nightmare vision.”
