Emad Salem
Emad A. Salem | |
|---|---|
| Born | circa 1950 |
| Occupation(s) | FBI informant, former military officer, security guard, engineer |
| Years active | 1991–1993 (as FBI informant) |
| Known for | Testifying in the trial of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing conspirators |
Emad A. Salem (born around 1950) served as an FBI informant and played a pivotal role as a witness during the trial of Ramzi Yousef, Abdul Hakim Murad, and Wali Khan Amin Shah, who were found guilty of the February 26, 1993 World Trade Center bombing. He testified that the explosive device was constructed under FBI oversight.
A former officer in the Egyptian military, Salem asserted that he operated as a sniper during the 1973 Yom Kippur War and was responsible for detaining 17 Israeli prisoners of war, all of whom were returned safely. At the FBI’s request, he cultivated relationships with the conspirators in 1991 amid the trial of El Sayyid Nosair. Prior to this, Salem held positions as a security guard at Bergdorf Goodman and worked as an engineer at a Best Western hotel in New York. By August 1991, while serving as head of security at the Woodward hotel in New York City, he approached FBI Agent Nancy Floyd with intelligence regarding an Egyptian individual posing a greater threat to public safety than Russian diplomats—identifying the blind sheikh, Omar Ahmad Ali Abdel-Rahman. Subsequently, Salem agreed to act as an informant for the FBI within Abdel-Rahman’s network centered around mosques in New York City.
Throughout his cooperation with the FBI, Salem recorded extensive conversations with his handlers and provided detailed reports for judicial proceedings. Following the bombings, he claimed that an FBI supervisor dismissed a proposal to use counterfeit explosives to deceive the plotters. Federal officials refuted these allegations, and The New York Times reported that the recordings did not clearly indicate how much federal authorities knew about the specific plan targeting the World Trade Center. Without Salem’s recorded evidence—which was never shared with The New York Times—he might have faced charges as a co-conspirator; these recordings were instrumental in preventing such accusations.
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- Living people with unknown birth date
- Egyptian nationals who emigrated to the United States
- Military members from Egypt
- Participants in the Yom Kippur War from Egypt
- Egyptian military figures of the 20th century
- Informants for the Federal Bureau of Investigation
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- World Trade Center-related subjects
- Living persons with unspecified birth year
- World Trade Center