The 'blind sheikh' called 'spiritual guide of 9/11' dies

Omar Abdel Rahman, the Egyptian-born "blind sheikh" and spiritual leader who was convicted in 1995 of being a mastermind of terrorist plots against the United States, and who was called the "godfather" of radical Islamist movements, died Feb. 18 at a federal prison in Butner, N.C., where he was serving a life sentence. He was 78.

The cause was diabetes and heart disease.

Abdel Rahman, who was blind from an early age, had denounced secular tendencies in other Muslims since the 1960s and was linked for decades with extremist Islamist circles in Egypt and abroad. He was twice acquitted of helping plot the 1981 assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat — whom he denounced as "not a Muslim" — and built an alliance with Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden while living in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

After moving to the United States in 1990, Abdel Rahman preached at storefront mosques in Brooklyn and New Jersey, and came under federal scrutiny after a 1993 bombing at the World Trade Center left six people dead and more than 1,000 injured.

Several of his followers were convicted in the bombing, although Abdel Rahman was not. Instead, he was arrested on broader conspiracy charges of planning to "levy a war of urban terrorism against the United States."

Among other actions, Abdel Rahman was accused of plotting a "day of terror" in which simultaneous bombs would blow up the United Nations, the Lincoln and Holland tunnels in New York City, the George Washington Bridge and the building housing New York's FBI headquarters.

"All I know is that I have nothing to do with this case other than that I am a cleric who prayed in a mosque," Abdel Rahman said during his 1995 trial in federal court in New York. "I did not speak. I did not give orders. I have nothing to do with anything."

Even while he being held for trial, Abdel Rahman delivered long sermons from jail, with his telephone messages amplified by microphones in the mosques frequented by his followers.

During the eight-week trial, Abdel Rahman's high-powered defense team included celebrity lawyers William Kunstler and onetime U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark. The evidence included secretly recorded wiretaps, which prosecutors said indicated Abdel Rahman's intent to wage a holy war in the United States.

In the end, he and nine followers were found guilty. At his sentencing, Abdel Rahman spoke in Arabic for nearly 90 minutes, touching on such subjects as birth control, homosexuality, former Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser and his green-card status.

"This is an infidel country," Abdel Rahman said in his rambling speech. "It has an infidel White House. It has an infidel Congress. It has an infidel Pentagon. And this is an infidel courthouse."

He was sentenced to life in prison and was held virtually incommunicado at several federal facilities, allowed only one 15-minute phone call with his family every week to 10 days. Two of his sons, who had been associated with Bin Laden and Al-Qaida, were not permitted to visit.

Nonetheless, Abdel Rahman became a powerful symbol in certain quarters of the Muslim world. Al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri called on Egyptians to kidnap Americans in effort to win Abdel Rahman's release. Zawahiri's younger brother proclaimed Abdel Rahman "the godfather of all Islamic movements."

After the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, Peter Bergen, a journalist and biographer of Bin Laden, described Abdel Rahman as the "spiritual guide of 9/11."

Omar Abdel Rahman was born May 3, 1938, in El Gamalia, Egypt. He lost his eyesight before his first birthday as a result of illness.

He studied a Braille version of the Qur'an and had memorized it by age 11. In 1965, he received a doctorate in Islamic law from Cairo's Al-Azhar University, the world's oldest Islamic university.

He preached at a small mosque in rural Egypt and became known for his criticism of the secular leadership of Nasser, calling him "the wicked pharaoh."

After being jailed for several months for his comments, Abdel Rahman spent three years teaching in Saudi Arabia, where he became more deeply immersed in a militant, hard-line form of Islam.