Blind sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the Egyptian-born cleric linked to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, died Saturday of natural causes in a US prison facility, the Justice Department said. Abdel Rahman was serving a life sentence on several terrorism-related charges at a Federal Medical Center in Butner, North Carolina. The sheikh was seen as a jihadist spiritual leader even after his conviction in 1995 for conspiring to bomb New York landmarks, including the United Nations, and assassinate the former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak.



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