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Terror by degree James Bone and Alan Road The Times October 18, 1997, Saturday

In Swansea he's remembered as an unassuming engineering student, but to the FBI he's the international terrorist responsible for the World Trade Center bombing. James Bone and Alan Road trace the double life of Ramzi Yousef

Police believe he was testing his plans for what he had codenamed - in Serbo-Croat - "Project Bojinka".

THE MAN NOW known as Ramzi Yousef is remembered at the Swansea Institute of Higher Education as a diligent student whose major project was to apply computer design to geometric Islamic patterns. The young Pakistani, born and raised in Kuwait, took a Higher National Diploma in computer-aided electrical engineering at the college between 1987 and 1989. He seemed perfectly law-abiding. Like the other foreign students, he registered with the local police station at the start of each academic year. Until the Special Branch and MI5 and the CIA turned up on their doorstep, none of the staff at the school had any clue that their unassuming pupil had graduated to become the most wanted terrorist in the world.

"He was hard-working, conscientious and kept himself to himself," said his computer graphics instructor, who asked not to be named for fear of reprisal. "That about sums him up over the two years he was here. There were other older Arabic students at the time, but to the best of my knowledge he didn't socialise with them. He was hard-working and very capable." When police in the Philippines chanced on Yousef's bomb factory after a fire in Manila on January 6, 1995, they reportedly found a copy of a chemistry textbook from the library of the Swansea Institute. Yousef himself was only apprehended a month later in Pakistan when a fellow Muslim tipped off the authorities in the hope of winning the $ 2 million reward posted by the US government. He is now in a holding cell in New York, deprived of his wristwatch, toothpaste, shaving cream, even - until he won a court order - his Koran, and barred from meeting anyone but his attorney lest he try to orchestrate revenge attacks.

He has already been convicted of a Hollywood-style plot to blow up 11 American jumbo jets almost simultaneously, and is now standing trial as the alleged mastermind of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York.

By any accounting, Yousef, at just 29, is one of the most audacious terrorists of all time, a master-criminal on a par with Carlos the Jackal or Abu Nidal. Not only did he allegedly tell FBI agents after his arrest that he had planned to kill 250,000 people by toppling one of the World Trade Center's 110-storey twin towers on to the other one, he also boasted that he had considered gassing the huge complex with lethal hydrogen cyanide.

If executed, his plot against American airliners would have killed some 4,000 passengers within the space of two days. In addition, he has been linked to the bombing of a Filipino airliner, which left one Japanese traveller dead; an attack on a Shia shrine in Mashhad, Iran, which claimed 70 lives; an explosion at a theatre in Manila; another blast near the Israeli embassy in Bangkok; a plot against the then-prime minister of Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto; and an attempt on the life of Pope John Paul II.

When seized, according to the FBI, he bragged about plans for a kamikaze attack on CIA headquarters with a light aircraft packed with explosives, and said he was preparing to assassinate President Bill Clinton by releasing phosgene gas during a presidential visit to the Philippines.

SITTING JUST YARDS from Yousef in an oak-panelled courtroom in downtown Manhattan, it is difficult to comprehend that this lean, raven-haired young man with flapping ears and a bulbous nose is an international enigma. Although often described as a Muslim fundamentalist, Yousef arrives in court clean-shaven and, on most days, wears a tan business suit. He could almost be the yuppie engineer his teachers at the Swansea Institute no doubt hoped he would become. When he defended himself in his first trial, he was courteous to the jury and insisted on referring to himself in the third person. ("I have seen better lawyers," the judge declared, "but I have also seen worse.") In the current trial, he chats contentedly with the defence lawyers, banters with the prosecutor and even laughs at the judge's jokes. But there are some tell-tale signs of his murky past: the tip of the middle finger on his right hand is badly deformed after it was almost severed in an explosion, and he has an injured left eye that drifts lazily around the room.

Over the years, Yousef has used at least a dozen aliases. On the formal indictment, he is named as Ramzi Yousef, aka Azan Muhammad, aka Khurram Khan, aka Rashed, aka Kamal Ibrahim, aka Abdul Basit, aka Adam Ali Qasam, aka Naji Haddad, aka Dr Paul Vijay, aka Dr Adel Sabah, aka Amaldo Forlani, aka Muhammed Ali Baloch. At the Swansea Institute, Yousef registered as Abdul Basit Mahmoud Karim. According to an investigation by The New Yorker magazine, his full name is Abdul Basit Mahmud Abdul Karim. In his only interview from jail, Yousef told the London-based Arabic newspaper Al-Hayat that his real name was Abdul Basit Balochi. But he added that he had become "accustomed" to Ramzi Yousef.

At first, investigators suspected that Yousef was an Iraqi secret agent. They speculated that he had appropriated the identity of the Swansea Institute student during Iraq's occupation of Kuwait, even substituting Yousef's fingerprints in government records. Unfortunately, the Swansea Institute did not take any photographs of its students in the 1980s. The school did keep a file on Abdul Basit Mahmoud Karim, but it disappeared from a locked office the day after it was located and photocopied by the Special Branch (there was no investigation of the burglary). The local police station does have a photograph of the Swansea student, but refuses to release the picture, citing the Data Protection Act.

A number of tantalising clues do point towards an Iraqi connection. Yousef once visited Baghdad and he first arrived in America on an Iraqi passport. The only one of his alleged co-conspirators still at large is an Iraqi who fled back to Baghdad, where he now lives openly. What is more, Kuwait has identified Yousef as a man who collaborated with occupying Iraqi forces, and it should not be forgotten that the World Trade Center bombing itself took place on the second anniversary of the liberation of Kuwait.

Years of investigation have convinced British and American intelligence services, however, that Yousef and the Swansea student are one and the same man and that he is linked to a shadowy Islamic underground spanning the globe from Egypt to Afghanistan to the Philippines. "He is a new breed of terrorist," says Vincent Cannistraro, a former head of counter-terrorism at the CIA. "You do not have tightly knit groups supported by intelligence agencies. What you have is a loose group based on some kind of activism."

Yousef's true identity holds the key to unravelling the terrorist network that sustained him. In his interview with Al-Hayat, Yousef disclosed that he was born in Kuwait to a Pakistani father and a Palestinian mother, and had relatives in Pakistan, Kuwait and Palestine. He also revealed that he was married to an Arab woman and had two young daughters, one of whom was born while he was a fugitive. Although he speaks almost unaccented English, Yousef has a Gulf accent in Arabic. He calls himself "Pakistani by nationality" but "Palestinian by choice". Indeed, Yousef openly declares himself to be a supporter of the previously unknown Liberation Army, which aims to punish the United States for its support of Israel. "Since the US government every year sends military and financial aid worth hundreds of millions of dollars to Israel, all Muslims have the right to regard themselves in a state of war with the US government," he announced in a statement released through his lawyer. One threatening letter allegedly found in Yousef's computer bore the signature: "The Fifth Battalion of the Liberation Army under the leadership of Abu Baker Almaki." It was the same group that claimed responsibility for the World Trade Center bombing.

Raghida Dergam, the Al-Hayat correspondent who interviewed Yousef in jail, notes that, unlike other supposed fundamentalists, he raised no objections to being interviewed by a woman, and he did not even fast in jail during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. When he arrived for the interview, he brought a stack of papers to prove his point about the illegality of the Israeli occupation of Arab lands. Tellingly, he denounced Yasser Arafat as an "Israeli agent".

"To me, he is not very religious," Dergam says. "In fact, he did not come across as a fundamentalist as such. He would fit more as a freedom fighter for the liberation of Palestine than the description of an Islamic fundamentalist driven by religion. He is very convinced there is something unjust in the actions of Israel and there has to be a way to bring attention to it. By that he justifies 'terror for terror'. My impression is that he is not a gun-for-hire."

YOUSEF'S FATHER is believed to be a Baluchi tribesman from Pakistan named Muhammad Abdul Karim, who moved to Kuwait to work as an engineer. Yousef was born in April 1968 in Fuhayhil, a working-class suburb of Kuwait City with a sizable Palestinian population. (Abdul Hakim Murad, Yousef's co-defendant in the plot against US airliners, is apparently a teenage friend from Fuhayhil.) In the town, Yousef was immersed in the radical ideologies of Palestinian nationalism and strict Sunni Islam. In the early 1980s, his father got involved with the puritanical Wahhabi sect of Sunni Islam - the dominant tendency in Saudi Arabia - and an associated fundamentalist group known as the Salafis.

When the family moved back to Turbat in Pakistan in 1986, they found the town had become a staging post for the Mujahidin waging war against the Soviets across the frontier in Afghanistan. On his return from his studies in Swansea, Yousef joined his father, an uncle and two of his brothers, and enlisted for the jihad. His nom de guerre was Ramzi. A year later, Yousef had returned to Kuwait, apparently taking a low-ranking job at the Planning Ministry. He was in the emirate when Iraq invaded in August 1990. Despite what Kuwait says about him collaborating with Iraqi forces, one of his seized passports suggests that he simply joined the mass exodus of foreign workers out of Kuwait to return home to Pakistan.

In early 1991, he surfaced in the Philippines, seeking to establish contact with the Abu Sayyaf separatist group fighting for independence for the Muslim population on the southern island of Mindanao. Edwin Angeles, a high-ranking defector, told the Washington Post that Yousef, travelling under his real name and accompanied by his childhood friend Murad, presented himself as a member of the executive committee of the International Islamic Brigade, an organisation that had recruited volunteers for the Afghan war. Yousef also told the Abu Sayyaf leader that he wanted to use the Philippines as a "launching pad" for international terrorism. Prosecutors allege that the conspiracy to bomb the World Trade Center began when Yousef left the Philippines on an Iraqi passport in 1992. By the end of May, he had turned up in the Pakistani frontier town of Peshawar. There he met Mohammad Ajaj, a Palestinian who had been expelled from Israel and sought exile in Texas. The one-time Domino's Pizza deliveryman had come to Peshawar for training in an Afghan camp. On September 1, 1992, the two boarded a Pakistani Airlines flight for New York.

Their arrival at John F.Kennedy Airport had elements of farce, but may actually have been a carefully planned diversion. Ajaj presented a fake Swedish passport, which failed to fool the immigration officer, who simply peeled off the photograph to find another underneath. When Ajaj was searched, police found three more passports - one British, one Saudi and one Jordanian - and a suitcase full of bomb-making manuals. He was arrested and remained in jail until after the World Trade Center bombing. Yousef, meanwhile, calmly showed an Iraqi passport with no US visa and said he had bribed his way aboard the flight by buying a boarding pass for $ 2,700. He asked for political asylum, and was freed pending an asylum hearing.

YOUSEF QUICKLY sought out the radical Muslims who congregated at the shabby shopfront mosques in Brooklyn and New Jersey. There he encountered the followers of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind Muslim cleric and fundamentalist leader later convicted in New York of sanctioning the World Trade Center bombing. The two could have met during one of the Sheikh's trips to Afghanistan, where both his sons fought in the jihad. According to court papers, the Sheikh's chauffeur introduced Yousef to his boss as "a friend from Afghanistan, a guy who will do anything".

In the current trial, Yousef is accused of organising a somewhat feckless group of local Muslim fundamentalists to bomb the World Trade Center. Prosecutors say he acquired the chemicals, mixed the explosives and then helped drive the truck bomb into the underground car-park beneath the twin towers. The blast on February 26, 1993, killed six people and injured 1,000 more, and marked the arrival of international terrorism on American shores. Four fundamentalists were quickly rounded up when one of them returned to collect the deposit on the Ryder rental van that had carried the bomb, saying it had been stolen. But Yousef had already escaped aboard a flight to Pakistan. The United States launched a worldwide manhunt. The FBI put him at the top of its "Most Wanted List" and offered a $ 2 million reward. Yousef's photograph was printed on thousands of green matchboxes distributed throughout the Middle East. He is believed to have gone underground in the riot-torn Pakistani port of Karachi. Within months, according to police in Pakistan, Yousef was plotting to assassinate Benazir Bhutto. Another teenage friend from Kuwait, Adbul Shakoor, told them that he, Yousef and Murad had scouted for locations to kill Bhutto. The plot collapsed when a bomb Yousef was making in a Karachi apartment exploded in his face - injuring his fingers and his eye. Shakoor also implicated Yousef in the explosion that killed 25 people at Mashhad in Iran on June 20, 1994 - an attack on a Shia shrine. Thai police also linked Yousef to a failed truck bombing of the Israeli embassy in Bangkok that March. Later that year, Yousef returned to the Philippines by boat from Malaysia and resumed training Abu Sayyaf guerrillas in the south of the country. On December 11, he bought a ticket in the name of an Italian politician, Amaldo Forlani, on a Philippines Airlines plane from Manila to Tokyo. Smuggling a liquid explosive aboard in a bottle of contact-lens solution, he assembled a bomb in the lavatory and left it under his seat before getting off at a stop-over in Cebu City. One Japanese businessman was killed when the bomb went off, but the plane managed to stay in the air. Police believe he was testing his plans for what he had codenamed - in Serbo-Croat - "Project Bojinka".

A fire led police to Flat 603 in the Dona Josefa Apartments in Manila at 10.30pm on January 6, 1995. It was a serendipitous event that probably saved thousands of lives. The authorities had been on alert for the imminent arrival of Pope John Paul II, and the flat was located just 200 yards from the Papal Nunciature. Inside the flat they found a mixture of crystalline chemicals in the sink, a pipe bomb and timer, a hand-written bomb manual in Arabic, ecclesiastical robes intended as disguises, a road map of the Pope's route and, most importantly of all, a Toshiba laptop computer. Yousef had rented the one-bedroomed flat in December and was sharing it with his old schoolfriend, Murad. When the fire broke out, the two calmly left the building - Yousef chatting on a mobile phone - and hid in a nearby karaoke bar. Murad was arrested when he returned to clean out the flat, but Yousef again eluded the law.

An analysis of deleted files in Yousef's laptop revealed the scope of "Project Bojinka". Five terrorists - codenamed Mirqas, Markoa, Obaid, Majbos and Zyed - were to plant bombs aboard a total of 11 US airliners before escaping to Pakistan. The computer hard-drive also yielded the draft of a letter claiming responsibility for the attacks. Yousef's globetrotting terrorist career came abruptly to an end when, to investigators' surprise, an acquaintance tipped off authorities in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad. Ishtiaq Parker, a South African Muslim who lived across the street from Yousef, was apparently tempted by the $ 2 million reward. Pakistan soldiers and US agents descended on the Su Casa guesthouse and found Yousef with two remote-controlled toy cars packed with plastic explosives, and a collection of newspaper stories about his exploits.

PROSECUTORS DO NOT have to prove who funded his terrorist exploits or to establish his real identity in order to secure a conviction. All they have to do is show beyond a reasonable doubt that the man in the dock committed the crimes with which he is charged. Investigators favour the theory that Yousef has been supported by rich Saudi extremists with whom he became involved during the Afghan war. In his Al-Hayat interview, Yousef revealed that the mysterious Liberation Army had "military divisions and groups, each of which is concerned about the affairs of the Islamic movement in different countries" and said it was "still existing and sometimes carries out military actions and does not claim responsibility for them". Asked who commanded the group, he answered: "Unknown, it is a secret."

The prime suspect is Osama bin Laden, the now notorious Saudi multi-millionaire who lives in exile in the hills of Afghanistan. The scion of a family which made its fortune in construction, Bin Laden is believed to have financed terrorist training camps to wage a personal jihad against the United States and moderate governments in Egypt, Algeria, Yemen and Saudi Arabia. "The weight of evidence points to a bin Laden connection rather than a state sponsor connection," says Cannistraro, the former CIA counter-terrorism chief.

When Yousef was apprehended, he was staying in a guesthouse set up for Afghan war veterans by Bin Laden and had Bin Laden's address in his wallet. A Bin Laden connection might also explain Yousef's trips to the Philippines, where the Abu Sayyaf group is thought to receive much of its money from Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, Bin Laden's brother-in-law.

But in a recent interview in Afghanistan with CNN, Bin Laden denied that he knew Yousef and insisted that he had no connection to the World Trade Center bombing. He dismissed the allegations against him as smears by American and Pakistani officials.

The staff at the Swansea Institute are understandably embarrassed that Yousef should have become their most famous alumnus. Members of the faculty have pored endlessly over police mugshots in an effort to jog their memories. They do recall that specialist magazines continued to arrive in the college post-room long after he departed, and that he never picked up a package he had left with a colleague. They are insistent, however, that Yousef did not learn his terrorist techniques on British soil. "His project was quite innocuous," his tutor insists. "Nothing that might be useful for a bomb-maker."