Mahmud Abouhalima

Mahmud Abouhalima (Arabic: محمود أبو حليمة) (born December 14, 1958) is an Egyptian citizen who is convicted as a perpetrator of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. He is currently serving a 78-year and 4-month sentence at ADX Florence in Florence, Colorado, for his role in the bombing.

Life

Born to a mill foreman in Kafr Dawar, Egypt, Abouhalima spent his adolescence with the Al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya, an outlawed Islamic group that heralded Omar Abdel Rahman as their spiritual leader. He briefly attended Alexandria University but dropped out and left Egypt altogether in 1981, moving to Germany. There, he later recalled he had lived a life "of corruption – girls, drugs, you name it".

The following year, Germany denied him political asylum, and he quickly married Renate Soika, a troubled German woman, which guaranteed he could remain in the country. He divorced Soika three years later but in short order married another woman named Marianne Weber in a Muslim ceremony. He flew to Brooklyn with his new wife, and after his American tourist visa expired, he applied for amnesty, claiming to be an agricultural worker. He was accepted as a permanent resident under the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986.

He worked as a New York City cabdriver from 1986 to 1991, though he saw his license suspended ten times during that period for failing to attend traffic court for cab violations, including traffic violations and an attempt to overcharge a customer.