You're listening to Law and Order Criminal Justice System, a production of Wolf Entertainment and iHeart podcasts.

In the criminal justice System, landmark trials transcend the courtroom to reshape the law.

The brave many women who investigate and prosecute these cases are part of a select group that has defined American history.

These are their stories.

February twenty sixth, nineteen ninety three, twelve eighteen pm, New York City.

In the shadows beneath the World Trade Center, the attackers pulled into the underground garage and stepped out with quiet precision.

They moved quickly, without drawing attention.

Their device was already assembled.

Haledda'side is the primary explosive, very sensitive, used in a detonator to begin that process, functioning magnesium.

There were putting some metal in with their explosives to make it a hotter, faster, more energetic material.

The mechanism was crude but carefully built.

It didn't need electronics or circuitry.

It only needed to buy them a head start and delay what was coming just long enough.

The timing mechanism was a burning link of green hobby fuse.

They kind you'd find on an me eight firecracker that would burn about twenty seconds per foot inside of a tigon tubing.

It's like clear garden hose, so people wouldn't see smoke inside of that van if they walked by the window.

There was no turning back.

The van sacked quietly in the garage, disguised as ordinary, hiding everything inside.

The men turned and walked away.

They dropped that van off, and they actually had another vehicle in there with them that would pick up the driver and take them out.

They were almost free, the plan unfolding exactly as they rehearsed, until they.

Got halfway up the ramp and there was a car stalled in front of them.

For a moment, they were trapped.

The exit was in sight, but the path was blocked.

Every second felt heavier than the last.

They looked at their watches and they figured they didn't have a lot more time to get out of there.

The fuse was burning and there was no time to hesitate.

When the stalled car finally moved, they didn't wait.

They hit the gaps.

They just cleared the ramp when the detonation occurred.

I got a call get out to the Guardia Airport.

There's been a bombing.

There was a thirty two foot crater in front of what was left of the building.

I was trying to figure out, am I dead?

Am I alive?

Where am I?

I'm Anisega Nicolazzi.

That's why terrorism works.

It doesn't care who you are.

From Wolf Entertainment and iHeart Podcasts.

This is law and order criminal justice system.

On a cold Friday afternoon in nineteen ninety three, a cargo van packed with explosives tore through the foundations of the World Trade Center.

Terrorists didn't bring the towers down, but they came close.

Six people were killed, among them a woman and her unborn child.

She was just about to go on maternity leave.

More than a thousand were wounded in the aftermath.

There was pandemonium and grief, but there was also resolve to rebuild and for accountability, starting with identifying and then tracking down the responsible for the destruction one by one across oceans, safe houses and bomb stained garages.

Investigators read fragments like fingerprints.

They chased shadows through phone calls and chemical residue.

While smoke was still pouring from the base of the World Trade Center.

A young federal prosecutor at the US Attorney's office in Lower Manhattan, Gil Childers got a knock on his.

Door February six, ninety three, the day that bombing took place at the World Trade Center.

Roger came into my office.

He said, you heard about something going on over the Trade Center.

I said, yeah, I heard some sort of transformer fire or explosion or something.

He said, yeah, maybe the Bureau thinks it might be something else, but whatever it is, it's yours.

So I called over to the Bureau, made contact and said, look, I'm the guy if you need anything.

Roger, one of Gill's supervisors at the time, was bringing him in early.

And as you might recall from season one, Gil was one of the cool headed prosecutors who helped take down the mob with the Commission case, and now a few years later, his career path was about to take another sharp turn.

That evening, I got a call, said, all right, I'll come into your office tomorrow morning.

Went over to twenty six Federal Plaza where the FBI was.

They said, clearly was not transformed.

There's nothing anywhere near where the explosion took place that could explode or should explode, and we think it was a car bomb.

All of a sudden, things got very active.

But even then Gil had no idea what he was in for.

Quite honestly, my thoughts were, Okay, fine, this is my case, but what are the odds of it ever becoming a prosecution as opposed to a twenty year investigation and never getting a body to prosecute.

So I thought, it'll just be something that'll be in the back burner of my career for however long i'm a prosecutor, but never really do anything.

Come Monday morning, barely two days later, it was no longer just a crime.

It was a case.

I spent the next two nights in the FBI sleeping on a couch, and we ultimately figured out at least one suspect, and within a few days had search warrants being executed and an arrest, and within a couple of days I'm in court doing an arraignment.

So it all happened extremely quickly, which is really the subtext for this entire case.

And this type of case hadn't exactly been in Gill's wheelhouse.

So at this point, how many cases involving terrorism had you ever handled?

Let me think that would be zero.

I knew that answer a massive bombing was now speeding toward trial and gil.

While an experience, Marian's prosecutor had never handled a case like this before, yet he was the one in charge of the case that would redefine how America responded to terrorism.

Just six days after the bombing, investigators were already hot on the trail of those responsible for the attack.

And it all began with a fragment of steel pulled from the wreckage.

Seventeen characters that would change everything.

A bin number etched into the cargo van that carried the bomb.

They traced the van to Ford.

Who'd you sell it to?

We saw to the writer rental company, the contact writer.

Where was this truck?

It was last rented out of Jersey City just a few days before the bombing, and this is the guy who rented the van.

The name on the contract was listed as Mohammed Salome and due to a stroke of pure luck, the FBI didn't have to go far to find him.

We were looking at Solomon and tracing him and then we get a call from the writer agency in Jersey City that says, Hey, the guy that rented that truck just called and he wants to come back and get his deposit.

A sting operation was quickly set in motion.

They put an FBI agent working the counter so when he came in, the FBI agent could ask him questions.

Former FBI agent Jim Maxwell remembers what happened next.

He physically came by the store to pick up his four hundred dollars deposit and was quickly arrested.

As a result, it gave investigators exactly what they needed Once.

We had him arrested.

That moved the investigation outward and gave us more information about exactly who he had been associating with.

That one piece of evidence really broke the whole case open.

By then, the FBI was already analyzing phone records and surveillance leads.

One call was traced to someone within a major tech company.

That was Nadal Ayod, who was a chemical engineer for Allied Signal.

Allied Signal it's a huge, huge company, a big time government defense contractor.

Nidal Ayod was just twenty five years old and had the resume of a success story.

Iod hardly fits the standard description of someone both deranged and determined.

He graduated with honors from Rutgers in ninety one with a degree in chemical engineering.

He was sort of living in the American dream.

He was from Jordan At County, United States.

He married a Jordanian woman that came here.

He had just had a baby and he got mixed up in this.

Agents confirmed his identity, mapped his movements, and planned the takedown in Maplewood.

Neighbors said they didn't know him, but that Iodd's apartment was a revolving door faceless people.

The next week we made the second arrest.

Iad was apprehended in his bedroom.

Jim was outside.

My job was to secure the back door of the residence and not to let anyone exit.

We deployed using two vans, and the first van was the team that was going to breach the front door.

Five to seven people perteen each with a task the objective take ayot alive.

I made my way down the side of the house.

Once Jim was halfway down the side of the house, something caught his eye.

I looked at my right and there was a panel truck parked in the backyard.

His heart began to pound.

Going through my mind, I said, well, we're working in an investigation that has to do with a bomb that was placed inside a panel truck my running by another bomb here, but luckily it turned out to be empty, and one of the male relatives of Vyad was trying to exit out of the back door, and we took him temporarily into custody.

At that moment, with Salome and iodding custody, investigators began mapping the structure of the broader network film logs, rental records, and surveillance photos.

And this started dovetailing into a spider web of individuals to look at.

We started writing search warrants on apartments pretty much all of which happened to be in Jersey City, and we started tracing where Salome had lived over the course of the last year or so.

The joint Toewsian Task Force was then going through all of their surveillance notes trying to find and he mentioned of Salome and who he was with or whenever he was seen.

Then came the lead that brought them to the heart of the operation.

It was a garage apartment behind a building in Jersey City where the construction of the bomb actually took place.

The address was a forty Pamrapo Avenue, a standalone building turned bomb factory, where agents Jim Maxwell and Dave Williams found chemical burns on the ceiling, scorched walls, and leftover ingredients, namely uria nitrate.

Which was in fact the main charge in the explosive device.

If viviben around that it has a very caustic, nauseous type smell.

No one was commercially producing urea nitrate, so this is one of the.

First Initially, no one could explain how they got their hands on it, but investigators soon got their answer.

Followed by the name of Abu Nidal was a chemist at a place in New Jersey that came from Afghanistan, was placed in Rutgers University and upon graduation he got this job at this chemical plant.

He ordered the chemicals that they needed.

Then came the cooks.

Ramsey Yosis had the recipe on how to do it, and then you had the humps Mohammed Salomi and Mahunabulima, who were actually doing the mixing.

Inside the apartment, agents saw clear signs of crude chemistry, stained walls, yellowed newspapers and buckets used for mixing.

They used newspaper to filter it, and as the nitric acid filtered through the newspaper turns the newsprint yellow doing a neighborhood around that Pamerapo address, we find neighbors had seen this large, red haired fella carrying five gallon pails of yellowed newspaper out to his taxicab.

They weren't just making one explosive.

They were experimenting for others too, and getting more savvy by the day.

They were actually manufacturing their own nitrichlists.

In that storage area, we found one two court glass bottle that was about half full of liquid nitroglycerine, which the New Jersey State Police bomb squad took in a total containment vessel to Liberty Park where they detonated it inside of their containment vessel and it subsequently cracked their containment vessel, so it was very energetic.

They also recovered all the components needed to make a timed detonation system.

The safehouse at Pamrapo Avenue had given up its secrets, but it was who had been seen at the apartment that truly strengthened the.

Case, identifying through photographs Ramsey Josef had been in there.

Ramsey Usaf.

He left that night the evening of the twenty sixth.

Matter of fact, the flight that he left from JFK was delayed because of the bombing.

But eventually got off the ground.

Within hours of the blast, Yusuf was in the air on a flight bound for Karachi.

Ramsey Ahmed Yusef is the focus of an international manhunt.

Investigators described the twenty five year old Iraqi born taxi driver as a major player in the world traits that are bombing, and they believe he's left the country.

We didn't know where he was.

As investigators scrambled to track Yusuf's movements, another person was also soon identified as part of the attack.

He too had fled the country.

We had identified Makmud Abohalima, and he was in Egypt.

He was an Egyptian citizen.

He proved easier to return.

We send some feelers out.

The Egyptians say we have him.

He gets sent back to the US and he gets arraigned.

While prosecutors focused on building cases against the men already in custody, investigators kept pulling threads.

That's when they discovered something that had been sitting under their noses for months, but no one knew it because it sat in an evidence locker.

Akhmud Ajaj, who entered the United States with Ramsey Yusef in September before the bombing, was detained for a counterfeit visa from September of ninety two until May of ninety three, when we decided to arrest him and were looking at a number of materials that he brought in with him that included bomb manuals, videos about had a blow up buildings, all sorts of stuff like this that had been sitting in i ins custody.

But then once the connection was made that all those materials were looked at and we decided, yeah, even though he was in custody the entire time, he was part of the conspiracy.

Ajaj hadn't taken part in the bombing itself, but the materials he carried into the country suggested something else.

Preparation, training and intent, and also a connection to usup months before their van ever builed into Manhattan, the blueprint for the World Trade Center bomb was now fully mapped.

At that point we knew those were the folks we would go to trial with.

They've all entered not guilty please, and they all remained in jail, held without.

Bond while federal prosecutors prepped their case Downtown.

The World Trade Center's CEO, Charlie Makish was also executing his own strategy.

His objective wasn't conviction, it was resurrection, and he was on a tight deadline.

We had transformers reconstructed that would have taken months, if not a year.

We had that done in three weeks so that we could power the trade center.

We had a temporary refrigeration plan built within that period of time and interconnected with pressure fittings with the existing refrigeration system in the trade center.

Everyone worked on overdrive.

Two hundred elevator technicians worked around the clock rebuilding one hundred elevators and because smoke had permeated through every square inch of the towers, achieving the cleanup needed would be nothing short of miraculous.

Ten million square feet of office space had to be scrubbed.

We used a sponge that later became the miracle sponge.

Mister Clean puts out the dry sponge.

The restoration company used the dry sponge to get the certain smoke off the walls, and they basically put people in front of a wall and they told them this is your section of wall that has to be cleaned tonight.

They were remarkable.

They cleaned everything in the trade center.

The pace was extraordinary.

Work around the clock.

We started at six o'clock in the morning at a coordination meeting as to what had been done the night before, decided on what we were going to focus on for that day to get done, and then we met again at six o'clock at night to go over what with the progress was and what the night shifts were going to do.

And then we had engineering meetings after that to figure out how we were going to put back the fire alarm communication systems, what we were going to do in terms of temporary security.

All of those meetings we had between the hours of eight and midnight, and then you went back to the hotel, got four to five hours sleeping, came back, and you did this for three weeks.

And on March eighteenth, nineteen ninety three, just three weeks after the blast, the South Tower officially reopened, followed by the North tower on April first.

They'd rebuilt the World Trade Center with remarkable speed, but even then it was clear that things would never be the same.

We actually built a memorial and it was built right above where the bomb went off.

Ellen Zimmerman was the architect for the memorial, in which the inscription on it was that below this spot in nineteen ninety three, February twenty sixth, international terrorism detonated a sixteen hundred pound bomb which killed seven people, injured thousands, and made victims of us all.

And when the reconstruction was complete, there was one more act of remembrance.

The Tibetan monks came over.

There were four of them, and they created what was called the sand Mendela, and it was a beautiful, beautiful picture that they did in sand.

The idea was that that would capture all of the negative energy in the building.

And after they spent months and months meticulously creating this mandela, they swept it up into a pile, put it in a container, and they paraded over to the Hudson River and they deposited in the Hudson River.

And the whole idea was at that point the negative energy in the Trade Center had been.

Removed, the towers were open again, and just across the river, justice would have it turn.

As the World Trade Center got back to business, prosecutors were busy getting ready to take four of the men responsible for the attack to trial.

Mahmud Abu Halima, who helped manufacture the bomb, Mohammed Salome, the one who rented the rider, Van Nidal Ayad, a chemical engineer with corporate access to key suppliers, and Ahmed Ajaj, who entered the country with a suit case full of bomb manuals.

The evidence was powerful, but law enforcement was still knee deep in prep The case needed more time, but the trial judge saw things differently.

The case was in front of Kevin Thomas Duffy in the Southern District of New York, and the defense to turn these very wisely said we very much want to demand a speedy trial, knowing that we were still really in early stages of doing the investigation that you would need where you could actually bring a trial.

The move forced prosecutors to accelerate their timeline.

The judge made it clear delays weren't an option.

They said, government, talk to your investigators and tell me what's the absolute earliest you think this case could go to trial.

I want a real number, because if it's inflaated, I'm just going to cut it in half.

By the end of May, we had decided that the lab work would probably be back by July, so maybe we could think of a trial sometime in the fall, and Duffy said, great, we'll start September, eighth day after Labor Day.

I was hoping more like November maybe, but he said the trial date never changed.

Just over three months for any felony trial.

That's fast, and for a case of this magnitude, nearly unheard of, and that meant there would be no downtime for the prosecutors.

Literally from maybe the second day that I worked on this in late February until the day of the verdict, there were two days Thanksgiving and Christmas that we weren't in the office in that year.

And that's it.

Sixteen hour days every day.

I lived in New Jersey, I had an hour commute each way, and I would be getting home after midnight every night, but I had to be out of the door by six thirty every morning, and I had a wife and kid, and I wanted to try and see a little bit once in a while.

Even with round the clock work, Gil still wasn't sure exactly what he'd be able to present at trial.

The day before I delivered the opening statement, I went through moot a practice of my opening and had had the leadership of the office listen to it get feedback.

One of the executive assistants in the office said, Gil, I think it was good, but my general comment is there's a lack of specificity.

I think you need to go into what your evidence is going to be on certain things, And I said, I would love to do that, but I don't know what the evidence is yet.

It was the reality of building a massive federal case on a wildly compressed timeline.

It was ludicrous, truthfully.

But off to trial they went.

Took about two and a half weeks to pick a jury and then we opened.

Ultimately there'd be two hundred and seven witnesses called for the government.

When I did that opening, we had spoken to less than half of the witnesses that we would eventually put on the stand.

And from personal experience, I'll tell you this, it's nerve racking for a trial attorney to put a witness on the stand without knowing what they're going to say.

Advance prep is invaluable when you can get it.

It gives you the roadmap, the strengths, weak spots, when to press forward, and when to illicit explanation.

But when you're forced to go in cold like Gil was, that's when thinking on your feet is everything.

When Gil stood up to deliver the opening statement, it was more than the obligatory preview of the government's case.

He also wanted to prepare the jury for the types of evidence he had and how many puzzle pieces it would be.

It was going to be almost an exclusively circumstantial case.

There were going to be thousands of little pieces of evidence that seemingly didn't do anything on their own, only when they're tied together, and that's not going to happen until summation.

So I had to prepare the jury for the fact that you're going to be bored stiff for weeks at a time as we're putting in little bits of evidence.

I can assure you are important, but you won't know it when we're putting them.

Then the strategy was to keep their expectations grounded and to ask them to trust that the many fragments would eventually reveal its shape.

Another hurdle.

This attack was unprecedented and the laws hadn't yet caught up.

There were no terrorism statutes at the time.

The defendants from ninety three bombing were tried for destruction of a building used in international commerce by means of explosive.

The first Major Terrorism Statue didn't enter the law until nineteen ninety four.

After this bombing, Gill and his colleagues had to use a patchwork of existing laws and repurpose statutes, statutes that couldn't capture the full scope of the devastation, but using every law they had at their disposal.

The US government, with Gill at the helm, walked into court and the trial began, and for the next six months, the prosecution mapped out the web of connections between the four defendant standing trial plus the two still at large.

It was the story of these six individuals working together.

Through a lot of telephone records, were able to demonstrate that they were calling chemical companies.

We didn't know what the conversations were because these weren't wiretafs.

They were calling around and obviously we could argue looking for places to buy certain things, and then at the bomb factory we were able to find packaging and bomb components that would bear the name of the manufacturer or the place where they were purchased.

They used several pressurized gas canisters as part of the bomb from a compressed gas supplier called AGL.

Those calls to the gas supplier were made from none other than the desk of needle iod.

We also had phone calls to rental car places, including the writer place in Jersey City, so phone records were very important as sort of the glue that helped us piece all this stuff together.

The case against each defendant wasn't always straightforward.

The other real challenge was that the case and the evidence against each of the four defendants was very different.

There were two of the defendants that were never at the bomb factory the garage apartment where the bombs were made.

They were never there, ever, and these people weren't under surveillance beforehand.

The analogy we prosecutors often uses that of a wheel.

Each player is more like the spoke of the wheel.

They are all necessary parts of making the wheel turn.

And besides the obvious significance of this crime, even the type of case was different than what federal prosecutors most often work with.

This was an entirely reactive prosecution, much more like a typical state case than a federal case, where you do an investigation, build a case, and bring it down.

This obviously happened with a bomb, and everything else was piecing it together afterwards.

And as the evidence came in so did the motive.

There was a claim of responsibility that was mailed to the New York Times in a letter saying that the bombing was carried out because of the US support for Israel and their policy with respect to Palestine.

We were able to get DNA off the flap of the envelope and the stamp.

One of them came back as a DNA match to Ayad.

The case against Abu Halima focused on a detail left behind.

When we did in search of his apartment in New Jersey, we found a pair of shoes that had acid burns and some other chemical residue on one of his shoes.

So between the settings of the car and that shoe, we were able to tie him to the bomb factory.

There were well over a thousand exhibits, and if you broke them down component wise, it'd probably three or four thousand exhibits.

Each was a piece of the puzzle.

Placed together, the full picture came into view.

But behind all the exhibits and evidence tags, at its center, this was a case about real people.

So in terms of witnesses that were affected or injured, we had witnesses who were in the garage.

Matter of fact, two of Our witnesses were Secret Service agents who were in the garage who were injured, so they were two firs.

They could give a little bit of law enforcement perspective as well as being actual victims.

And we had people that had come down the stairs.

We had people who were affected not immediately by the blast as opposed to debris falling from the blast.

But most of the testimony about injuries really came in through first responders.

The government also called experts like FBI explosive specialist Dave Williams.

When I started testifying about where and what and how things were placed, they had the wide open mouth look the defendants did, how was he watching us do this?

Charlie Makish, the World Trade Center CEO, testify too.

My role in the trial was to describe the Trade Center what it stood for, because he had to establish federal jurisdiction.

The fact that it was a center for international trade and commerce established that federal jurisdiction.

And then I had to describe what the Trade Center was, and then I had to describe the events of that day and the bomb.

As he cited facts about what had happened that day, the deep toll, it had taken was also clear.

I told him not to ask me how it affected me emotionally, and he did and I broke down on the stand.

Afterwards, I said, Gill, you only you weren't going to do that, and he said, well, Charlie, I wanted the jury to see it.

After months of trial, closing arguments and then the court's instruction, the case was finally given to the jury to deliberate.

It was out of the prosecution's hands and they were left to wait and wonder what the jury would do.

Trial lasted just over six months.

The verdict came in actually on the one year anniversary of the first arrest of Mohammed Salome.

The jury was deliberating on the addiversary of the bombing, just again a reminder of the speed with which all this happened, and the verdict was all four defendants on each count, so it was a clean sweep.

After the convictions were in the court next turned to sentencing.

Definitely was not available to us for these individuals at that time.

The judge was not allowed to give them life, so it was important that he actually give a number of.

Years, and the judge found a rather unique way to quantify what had been lost Judge Duffy.

He took the six individuals who were killed and looked at actuarial tables relevant to the six individuals and added up the years that the tables told them the individuals would still live, and that total was the number of years that he gave each of the defendants.

Two hundred and forty years in prison for each defendant.

The sentence was a stark reminder of the two hundred and forty years taken from the people who'd been killed.

At sentencing, the courtroom heard from the victims' loved ones.

Among them was Ed Smith, who lost his pregnant wife, Monica, in the blast.

Ed was strong, he was obviously tremendously affected.

Not only lose his wife, but he lost was would have been his firstborn.

It was a boy that had already named him.

He was going to be Eddie Junior.

So it was doubly painful.

The verdict was a major win.

That their work wasn't over.

There were two suspects still out there and investigators were zeroing in fast.

At the nineteen ninety three World Trade Center trial, four men were convicted, two others were still at large, Abdul Rama Yacine and the mastermind Ramsey Yusef.

Yusuf slipped out of the country just hours after the blast.

For two years, he stayed one step ahead, vanishing into the sprawl of Karachi, slipping in and out of Afghanistan.

Then came a break in the Philippines.

After a chemical fire in a Manila apartment, authorities uncovered a laptop belonging to Yusef, filled with blueprints, airline routes and a plan to detonate bombs mid air across the Pacific.

The plan was called Ojinka, and buried within its files was another concept hijacked planes crashed them into American landmarks.

Yusuf's name was now tied not just to New York, but to a global conspiracy.

February seventh, nineteen ninety five, a tip came in.

US officials and Pakistani police converged on a modest guesthouse.

Inside they found forged passports, explosive residue, blueprints for bombs, and Ramsey Yusuf asleep.

The apprehension was swift, and within hours he was in US custody on a one way flight back to New York, delivered to the very city he had tried to destroy.

The plane some multary aircraft that landed up the Newburgh at the air base at the time, and then he was brought by helicopter to Manhattan and they circled the Trade Center with it.

And when the agency's rhythm said, see they're still standing, and he said they wouldn't have been if I had more money.

That chilling remark was more than bravado.

It was a glimpse into Yusuf's intent and it would follow him into court.

We learned from Ramsey Yusef that his intention was by putting the bomb next to the south wall of the North Tower, they were hoping that for that tower to fall and then take the South tower down with it.

Luckily they didn't know this, but those buildings were built to a standing awful lot.

And as soon as the flight touched down in Manhattan, Yusuf officially became a defendant in one of the first major foreign terrorism trials on US oil.

He was tried more than once.

His first trial was about Bojinka.

Yusuf represented himself, called the attacks retain alliation, showed no remorse.

He was convicted.

Then came the World Trade Center trial.

Prosecutors laid out the ryder Van rental, the fingerprint evidence, the bomb chemistry, the plan to kill tens of thousands.

Use have never wavered in his defense, but the jury saw through it and brought back a thunderous conviction.

He is now serving life without parole plus two hundred and forty years.

When he was sentenced, the judge let him go on for hours.

When Ramsey use have said, if it takes us a thousand years, those evil towers of capitalism will come down, and that put a chill through me.

He said, they're not going to stop, and they didn't.

He was part of the team of terrorists that formulated the concept of flying the planes in and presented that to Osama bin Laden.

But not everyone was caught.

Because in that Manila apartment investigators did just stop a terror plot.

They uncovered the blueprint for something even worse and what would soon materialize.

With that, they found a name Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, who was Ramsey Yusuf's uncle.

Mohammad was listed in FBI reports and discussed in intelligent cables circulated among agencies, and eight years after that rider truck detonated in the trade center garage, Mohammed and another group of men took a more direct approach.

They used boarding passes and box cutters and flight simulators.

Early reports are just coming in now from the wire service as a small commuter plane apparently hitting the side of the World Trade Center happened, oh, just a few minutes ago.

But you can see the smoke.

The smoke tower is growing.

There is quite a bit of flame inside the building.

The two towers are fur home at least during the day to upwards of fifty thousand workers.

This wasn't a new conflict.

It was the same one escalated and this time the towers were brought down.

It sounds unbelievable to speak the words, but the World Trade Center is essentially gone, struck by two airplanes, apparently both of them them hijacked.

This is the second plane that struck the World Trade Center shortly after nine o'clock Eastern time this morning.

An earlier plane left the tower of smoke in the upper stories of the building on the right there.

So both towers hit by planes.

They burned for a while, and then one at a time they both collapsed.

This podcast isn't focused on nine to eleven, and we won't be covering it in depth, not out of disregard, but because it's been examined thoroughly and powerfully elsewhere.

Still for this story important for context.

We all know how the story ends.

We all remember where we were when it happened.

September eleventh is etched into global memory not just as a day of unparalleled loss, but as a hinge point in history.

When the towers fell, the skyline changed, and with it, so did everything else.

What followed was the most aggressive reorientation of US law enforcement priorities in modern history.

That morning reshaped America's response to terrorism.

What began with manhunts and Manila folders in the nineteen nineties became something far more expansive, a permanent infrastructure, a new doctrine, and a machine built to stop the next attack before it starts.

But before all that was put in motion, there was a time when the threat we feared most wasn't farn at all.

It was already here.

A federal office building in Oklahoma City lies in ruins tonight, and here's the very latest.

At least twenty six people were killed.

That includes twelve children trapped inside a daycare center, but the death toll is expected to swell because there were still three hundred people unaccounted for.

Rescue teams were on the scene within minutes, and they were shocked by what they found.

The entire front of the building was blown away.

Victims told harrowing tales of their escape from the rubble and wondered about those not so lucky.

Next time on Law and Order Criminal Justice System.

My wife, she was in the building.

It was obviously there had been an explosion.

That had fallen three floors.

Was buried under about ten feet of brubble, upside down, still in my desk chair.

Reports say the FBI is putting together pieces of a truck they think carried the bomb.

Some parts were found two blocks away.

I walked into the YMCA and I could see blood spatter from four feet down.

Start screaming, we have a live one.

We have a live one.

He said, we can't see.

We have to follow the sound of your voice.

Stay with us.

Law and Order Criminal Justice System is the production of Wolf Entertainment and iHeart Podcasts.

Our host is Anna Sega Nicolaze.

The show was written by Cooper Mall, executive produced by Dick Wolf, Elliot Wolf and Stephen Michael at Wolf Entertainment.

On behalf of iHeart Podcasts executive producers Trevor Young and Matt Frederick, with supervising producer Chandler Mays and producer Jesse Funk.

This season is executive produced by Anna Sega Nicolazi.

Our researchers are Luke Stantz and Carolyn Tolmage.

Editing and sound designed by Trevor Young and Jesse Funk.

Original music by John O'Hara, original theme by Mike Post with additional music by Steve Moore and additional voice over by me Steve Zernkelton.

Special thanks to Fox five in New York for providing archival material for the show.

For more podcasts from My Heart in Wolf Entertainment, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows.

Thanks for listening.