Ramzi Ahmed Yousef was apprehended in Pakistan on Tuesday and flown to New York the same day, said U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno in a statement issued Wednesday night.
Pakistan's Interior Ministry arrested Yousef and immediately handed him over to U.S. officials for extradition, said a senior Pakistani official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Yousef fled the United States after the Feb. 26, 1993, bombing that killed six people, injured more than 1,000 and caused more than a half-billion dollars worth of destruction in Manhattan's financial district.
Yousef, 27, was charged in an indictment with 11 counts relating to the bombing. The most serious charges carry a maximum penalty of life in prison without parole.
Four of his co-defendants were convicted last March of carrying out the bombing. During their trial, a lawyer for one of the defendants and prosecutors portrayed Yousef as the mastermind of the plot.
The FBI claimed Yousef helped import, make and store materials used in the bombing, and then managed to leave the country the evening of the explosion.
Yousef's apprehension comes as 11 other men allegedly led by fundamentalist cleric Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman are on trial in New York, accused of a much wider plan of terrorism to force the United States to change its policies in the Middle East.
Prosecutors say that WTC bombing and the earlier assassination of a right-wing rabbi were the opening salvos in their planned war of urban terrorism.
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