'The Blind Sheikh,' Tied To '93 World Trade Center Attack, Dead At 78

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork/AP) -- Omar Abdel-Rahman also known as the "blind Sheikh," has died at a prison hospital in North Carolina at age 78, law enforcement sources told CBS2.

Abdel-Rahman inspired the 1993 World Trade Center attack, a plot to blow up local landmarks and issued the Islamic ruling that Osama bin Laden used to justify 9/11.

Rahman was convicted in 1995 for involvement in the bomb plot, which targeted the United Nations, the Holland Tunnel and the Lincoln Tunnel.

Prosecutors said at the time the terror plots were intended to force the United States to end its support of Israel and Egypt.

He also was convicted at the same trial of plotting to kill former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. He defiantly professed his innocence in the plot, declaring: "This case is nothing but an extension of the American war against Islam."

Kenneth McKoy of the Federal Correction Complex in Butner, North Carolina, said Rahman died at 5:40 a.m. after a long battle with diabetes and coronary artery disease.

Abdel-Rahman was serving a life sentence in prison at the time of his death.

Abdel-Rahman was a key spiritual leader for a generation of Islamic militants and became a symbol for radicals during two decades in American prisons.

Blind since infancy from diabetes, Abdel-Rahman was the leader of one of Egypt's most feared militant groups, the Gamaa Islamiya, which led a campaign of violence aimed at bringing down ex-President Hosni Mubarak.

Abdel-Rahman fled Egypt to the U.S. in 1990 and began teaching in a New Jersey mosque. A circle of his followers were convicted in the Feb. 26, 1993, truck bombing of New York's World Trade Center that killed six people -- eight years before al-Qaida's suicide plane hijackers brought the towers down. 

Later in 1993, Abdel-Rahman was arrested by authorities who accused him and others of conspiring to wage a string of bombings against the United Nations and other New York landmarks, including the George Washington Bridge and the Lincoln and Holland tunnels.

But since his imprisonment, Abdel-Rahman's influence had been seen more as symbolic than that of a practical leader. His Gamaa Islamiya, which led a wave of violence in the 1990s, was crushed a decade ago, and its leaders, jailed in Egypt, declared a truce.

Abdel-Rahman's activities pre-dated Osama bin Laden's formation of al-Qaida in the late 1990s. But he was an influential figure in the generation of Islamic extremists that emerged from Egypt over the past two decades.

While Abdel-Rahman was the spiritual leader of Gamaa Islamiya, his longtime associate from Egyptian militant circles, Ayman al-Zawahri, was a leader of the Islamic Jihad militant group, whose experienced fighters he later allied with bin Laden's riches to form al-Qaida. Al-Zawahri is now leader of al-Qaida.

The two groups shared an ideology rejecting the governments of Egypt and other Arab countries as infidels that must be brought down by force. Between 1990 and 1996, they carried out a wave of attacks on Western tourists, Egyptian police and Coptic Christians until a heavy-handed government crackdown largely shattered them.

(TM and © Copyright 2017 CBS Radio Inc. and its relevant subsidiaries. CBS RADIO and EYE Logo TM and Copyright 2017 CBS Broadcasting Inc. Used under license. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)

In:
• New York City