Mahmud Abouhalima

Mahmud Abouhalima
Born	1959 (age 57–58) Kafr Dawar, Egypt
Residence	ADX Florence, the Federal ADX Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado.
Other names	Mahmud the Red
Known for	1993 World Trade Center bombing

Mahmud Abouhalima (Arabic: محمود أبو حليمه ‎‎; born 1959) is a convicted perpetrator of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. His red hair earned him the nickname Mahmud the Red.

Born to a mill foreman in Kafr Dawar, Egypt, Abouhalima spent his adolescence with the Al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya, an outlawed Islamic group that heralded Omar Abdel Rahman as their spiritual leader. He briefly attended Alexandria University, but dropped out and left Egypt altogether in 1981, moving to Germany. There, he later recalled he had lived a life "of corruption - girls, drugs, you name it".

The following year, Germany denied him political asylum and he quickly married Renate Soika, a troubled German woman, which guaranteed he could remain in the country. He divorced Soika three years later, but shortly after he married another woman named Marianne Weber in a Muslim ceremony. He flew to Brooklyn with his new wife and after his American tourist visa expired, applied for amnesty claiming to be an agricultural worker and was accepted as a permanent resident under the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986.

He worked as a New York City cabdriver for five years from 1986–1991, though he saw his license suspended ten times during that period, for failing to attend traffic court for cab violations including traffic violations and an attempt to overcharge a customer.

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