The device, 1,200 lbs of explosives, several heavy tanks of hydrogen, a detonator of nitroglycerine and two 20-foot fuses, had been hidden in a rented yellow Ryder Econoline van that had been parked in a public car park beneath the Twin Towers twelve minutes earlier. The bomb, on level B-2 of the complex, had smashed a hole through the foyer of the Vista hotel, two floors above it, and penetrated three floors down. A 3,000 lb steel joist was ripped from its mountings and thrown 35 feet inside Tower One. That evening Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, a 25-year-old Pakistani, took a $30 cab ride to JFK airport, boarded a Pakistan International Airlines plane to Karachi and disappeared.Ramzi had arrived in America nearly six months earlier. He had been detained on arrival but released because immigration officials were too busy to deal with him. Within days he had started gathering a team around him. A group of disaffected and alienated young Muslims had congregated around the al-Farouq mosque in Brooklyn, once the Maktab al-Khidamat’s favourite recruiting ground for the Afghan jihad in New York, and there Ramzi found his first volunteers.
