Ramzi Yousef — two years abroad, undone by an informant’s matchbook

On February 7, 1995, agents of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, working with special agents of the U.S. Diplomatic Security Service, raided a guesthouse in Islamabad and arrested Ramzi Yousef, the man who had built and detonated the bomb that tore through the World Trade Center two years earlier. He was taken in room 16 of the Su-Casa guesthouse before he could move on to Peshawar, ending a flight that had carried him across continents since the night of the attack. Within days he was on a plane to New York to stand trial.

The crime that made him a fugitive was the bombing of February 26, 1993. Yousef and a small group assembled an improvised device of roughly 1,500 pounds, built around urea nitrate, and parked it in a rental van in the underground garage beneath the World Trade Center’s North Tower. The explosion killed six people, injured more than a thousand, and was intended, by Yousef’s own account, to topple one tower into the other. The towers stood, but the attack was the deadliest act of foreign terrorism on American soil to that point and a preview of the ambition that would return to the same buildings eight years later.

Yousef did not linger to be caught. He flew out of New York on a Pakistani passport hours after the bombing and spent the next two years moving through the Middle East and Asia, plotting further attacks rather than hiding from the last one. In the Philippines he developed the operation known as Bojinka, a scheme to blow up roughly a dozen U.S. airliners over the Pacific, and conducted a lethal test on a Philippine Airlines flight in December 1994. A chemical fire in his Manila apartment forced him to flee and left behind a laptop that exposed the plot. The end came not from that evidence directly but from a man who turned him in: an associate, drawn by a Rewards for Justice advertisement, walked into the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad and gave up his location. The informant was paid two million dollars.

Extradited to the United States, Yousef was convicted twice in federal court in New York: on September 5, 1996, for the Bojinka conspiracy, and on November 12, 1997, for masterminding the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. On January 8, 1998, a judge sentenced him to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole plus 240 years. He has been held since in the federal supermax penitentiary at Florence, Colorado.

Carlos the Jackal — two decades of sanctuary ended by a sedative

In the early hours of August 14, 1994, in a villa in Khartoum, Sudan, French intelligence officers took custody of Ilich Ramírez Sánchez — the man the world knew as Carlos the Jackal — after he had been sedated following minor surgery, bundled him aboard a private jet, and flew him to Paris to stand trial. He had eluded Western capture for nearly two decades, sheltered in turn by Eastern Bloc security services, Syria, and finally Sudan. The seizure was not an arrest in any ordinary legal sense; Sudan had no extradition treaty with France, and Carlos was effectively kidnapped from the territory of a sovereign state by foreign agents acting with the host government’s quiet acquiescence.

Carlos was a Venezuelan-born professional revolutionary, recruited into the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and active across the European terror networks of the 1970s and 1980s. His infamy rested on two events above all: the killing of two unarmed French counterintelligence agents and a Lebanese informant on the Rue Toullier in Paris in June 1975, and the December 1975 raid on the OPEC oil ministers’ conference in Vienna, in which his commando seized dozens of hostages and killed three people. For years he moved under layered protection, treated by the governments that hosted him as an asset, a liability, and finally an embarrassment.

The capture closed a manhunt that conventional law enforcement could never have completed, because the obstacle was never Carlos’s tradecraft but the political shelter of the states that harbored him. France did not out-investigate him; it waited until his protectors had tired of him, then collected him when Khartoum, courting better relations with the West, declined to stand in the way.

On December 23, 1997, after a trial in Paris, a French court convicted Carlos of the Rue Toullier murders and sentenced him to life imprisonment. He has remained in French custody ever since. Two further trials produced two additional life sentences — in December 2011 for a campaign of bombings in France in 1982 and 1983, and in March 2017 for a 1974 grenade attack on a Paris drugstore — leaving him to serve out his life in prison for crimes committed across two decades of flight.