He died in the Butner Federal Correctional Complex, near Raleigh, N.C., where he was serving a life sentence, said Greg Norton, a spokesman for the prison. He said Mr. Abdel Rahman died from complications from diabetes and coronary artery disease.
In Mr. Abdel Rahmans trial, prosecutors described the World Trade Center attack as part of a broader conspiracy involving the blind cleric. They depicted the 1993 bombing as part of an overarching plot that included the killing of a militant rabbi in 1990 and the conspiracy to blow up New York land
In learned but vitriolic jeremiads, Mr. Abdel Rahman denounced Egypts secularist leaders as corrupt pharaohs and infidels. He proclaimed that faithful Muslims had a duty to wage jihad, or holy war, to install a regime in Egypt that would obey the strictest Islamic laws. He decried what he regarded
In 1990, as he fled from Egypt, Mr. Abdel Rahman moved to the United States, bringing his anti-American preaching and his campaign against President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt to mosques in Brooklyn, N.Y., and Jersey City, N.J.
At the end of his life, Mr. Abdel Rahman, who was known as the blind sheikh, was much diminished, having spent years in the most severe solitary confinement, barred from communicating with his followers, praying with other Muslim prisoners, or even listening to Arabic radio. Failing blood circulatio
rulers who did not follow Islamic law. Saad Hasaballah, a lawyer who represented Mr. Abdel Rahman in the Sadat assassination trials, said the sheikh told the Islamist army officers involved in the plot that a secular leader like Sadat deserved death although he never mentioned the president by name.
