Mahmud Abouhalima () (born December 14, 1958) is an Egyptian citizen who is convicted as 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, applied for amnesty claiming to be an agricultural worker and was accepted as a permanent resident under the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986.
He worked as a New York City cabdriver for five years 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.
In his free time, Abouhalima worked long hours for a non-profit group in Brooklyn that raised money for the Afghan Mujahideen.
Militancy
Abouhalima travelled to Afghanistan in 1988, saying he wanted to prove he "was a Muslim, not a sheep", and received combat-training in Peshawar. When Nosair assassinated Meir Kahane, Abouhalima was driving the purported getaway car, although Nosair accidentally jumped into another cab by mistake.
In March 1994, Abouhalima was sentenced to 240 years in prison. After an appeal, the sentence was later reduced to 1,300 months or 108 years. In 2021, one of Abouhalima's convictions were overturned, cutting his sentence by 30 years. He is currently an inmate at ADX Florence in Florence, Colorado. He is scheduled for release on March 8, 2060. Abouhalima's Federal Bureau of Prisons ID# is 28064–054. In 2013, Abouhalima gave an account about his life in supermax prison, stating “Sitting in a small box in a walking distance of eight feet, this little hole becomes my world, my dining room, reading and writing area, sleeping, walking, urinating, and defecating. I am virtually living in a bathroom, and this concept has never left my mind in ten years.” He also stated how limited his communications were in prison.
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