WHEN THE MASTERMIND of the earlier attempt to destroy the World Trade Centre, Ramzi Yousef, was flown in a helicopter past the twin towers, an FBI agent briefly lowered his blindfold. 'See, you didn't get them after all,' the agent taunted as the international symbol of American riches shined in the night. 'Not yet,' Yousef reportedly replied.
The self-proclaimed terrorist, who was being flown to Manhattan ahead of his trial over the 1993 bombing, was one of the foot soldiers for Osama bin Laden who not only targeted the United States but also took his worldwide terror campaign into the heart of East Asia. In addition to making the first attack on the World Trade Centre, Yousef also masterminded a bin Laden plot in the Philippines two years later, which sought to blow up American airlines flying from Hong Kong and other Asian capitals.
He and two associates - including a veteran of Afghanistan's Mujahedeen who bin Laden calls a comrade-in-arms - had planned '48 hours of terror in the sky' designed to kill 4,000 Americans aboard up to 20 US commercial flights over the Pacific, said US authorities. Their operation was foiled when chemicals exploded in a Manila flat in January 1995, forcing the terrorists to flee.
As authorities across Asia join their counterparts throughout the world in assessing the ramifications of Tuesday's assault on the United States, bin Laden's networks in the region are set to come under renewed scrutiny.
Yousef's earlier efforts, in unsuccessfully targeting first the World Trade Centre and then commercial flights, bear remarkable parallels with this week's nightmare scenario which saw terrorists - perhaps learning from those failures - cause devastation by crashing hijacked planes into not only the New York landmark but also the Pentagon.
The homemade cyanide bomb which, in 1993, Yousef and his accomplices hid inside a van parked in the basement of the World Trade Centre, killed six and injured hundreds but was designed to inflict far more casualties.