jorge fuentelsaz
New York, Feb. 26 A group of relatives of victims and political representatives today commemorated the 30th anniversary of the first attack on the World Trade Center in New York, perpetrated by a cell of radical Islamists, and considered by the FBI as the “dress rehearsal” for the 9/11 attacks. September 2001 against the Twin Towers.
Next to one of the fountains erected in memory of the victims of the two attacks that occurred in 1993 and 2001, in the economic district of Wall Street, in Manhattan, a policeman began the ceremony by ringing a bell at 12:18, the same time at which, three decades ago today, the explosion of a vehicle loaded with explosives took place.
“On February 26, 1993, a group of terrorists with an ideology similar to that of Al Qaeda, but who were not from Al Qaeda, launched an attack on the Twin Towers from the underground parking lot of the north tower” in which six were killed. people and about a thousand were injured, explains to Efe Gaby Sarmiento, a worker at the Museum dedicated to 9/11 and that sinks at the foot of the Wall Street skyscrapers.
Next to a plaque that marks the approximate place where the terrorists located the truck loaded with 550 kilograms of explosives, in the old B2 parking lot of the north tower, Sarmiento explains that the plan of the group, calling itself the Liberation Army-Fifth Battalion, was to burst the foundations of the skyscraper with the intention that it would collapse on the south tower causing the fall of both symbols of economic progress in the United States and therefore of Western capitalism.
THE 9/11 DRESS REHEARSAL
The explosion created a crater almost 30 meters deep, but missed its target. For the FBI: “Middle Eastern terrorism had reached American soil” and had done so “with a bang.”
A few days after the attack (on March 4) the first suspect was arrested, Mohammad Salameh, who had returned several times to the agency where he had rented the van with which they carried out the attack to demand payment of the deposit.
Later, the rest of those involved fell, all sentenced to life imprisonment, with the exception of the one considered their ringleader, the Pakistani Ramzi Yousef, who flew to Pakistan the same night as the attack, where he was captured in 1995, after a former collaborator betrayed him in exchange for the reward offered for him.
After being extradited to the United States, Yousef, nephew of the alleged “mastermind” of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohamed, was also tried and sentenced to life imprisonment.
For the FBI “the attack turned out to be a kind of deadly dress rehearsal for 9/11, and with the help of Yousef’s uncle, Khalid Sheikh Mohamed, al Qaeda would later turn to make Yousef’s nightmare come true.”
THE MEMORY OF THE VICTIMS
Their names were engraved on a small fountain erected roughly over the spot where the vehicle had been detonated. Five names of men and one of a woman, that of Mónica Rodríguez Smith, seven months pregnant and that her maternity leave began the next day.
But in the colossal destruction caused by the terrorist attack of 9/11, their names were also lost, except for a piece recovered from the source in which the name of one of the deceased John (DiGiovanni) can be read and which is exhibited in the 9/11 museum.
Their names and faces can be seen alongside the photographs and names of those who lost their lives eight years later. And they can also be read in one of the two square fountains that sink into the ground like a shadow where the now-sunk imposing skyscrapers used to rise and that house the names of all the victims of the two attacks.
The 9/11 museum also reserves a room for the 1993 attack located at the end of its journey through the nightmare of 9/11, where recordings of desperate victims are mixed moments before dying, personal belongings found among the ruins or remains of the buildings and planes that hit the towers.
They cannot be photographed, but they are there: the piece of the fountain, a piece of the wall of the B2 parking lot in the north tower, the computer of one of the members of the terrorist cell, the envelope they sent to The New York Times. to claim responsibility for the attack or pieces of the van that hid the attacks.
Sarmiento, who confesses the hardship that working in this museum sometimes entails, assures that after what happened in 1993 the stairs were widened, the routes to the exits were marked with fluorescent paint and the doors were marked with the word “Exit ” (Exit), to facilitate evacuation: details, which, he explains, helped save lives in the 9/11 attacks.
After today’s brief ceremony, which was led by New York Governor Kathy Hochul and the city’s mayor, Eric Adams, several relatives of the victims recalled the names of the deceased aloud and painted roses on the plaque. where their names are carved. EFE
jfu/laa
(Photo)
