A van bomb tears a crater under the World Trade Center
On this day · 26 February 1993
A 1,200-pound bomb in a rented van failed to topple the towers in 1993, but it killed six and previewed a darker decade.
Just after noon on February 26, 1993, a Ryder rental van packed with a roughly 1,200-pound urea-nitrate bomb detonated in the underground parking garage beneath the North Tower of New York’s World Trade Center. The blast carved out a crater 150 feet wide and several stories deep, collapsing concrete floors and filling the towers with choking smoke.
The attackers, led by Ramzi Yousef, had hoped to topple the North Tower into its twin. The buildings held. Even so, six people were killed and more than 1,000 were injured, and the complex suffered over $500 million in damage.
Investigators traced the van’s identification number to a rental agency, and one conspirator, Mohammed Salameh, was arrested when he returned to reclaim his deposit. Several plotters were convicted; Yousef was later captured abroad. The 1993 attack proved a grim rehearsal for what the same target would face eight years on.
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