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Jury rules port authority was negligent in 93wtc { October 26 2005 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/26/nyregion/26cnd-wtc.htmlhttp://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/26/nyregion/26cnd-wtc.html
October 26, 2005
Jury Rules Port Authority Was Negligent in '93 W.T.C. Blast
By JAMES BARRON, COLIN MOYNIHAN and ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS
A Manhattan jury ruled today that the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey was negligent in the 1993 terror bombing of the World Trade Center, which left 6 people dead and more than 1,000 injured.
The jury decided that the Port Authority, the agency that owned the twin towers in Lower Manhattan, was negligent in not better securing the underground parking garage where terrorists detonated a rented van packed with explosives on Feb. 26, 1993. Eight years later, terrorists used hijacked airliners to destroy the pair of quarter-mile-high buildings on Sept. 11, 2001, an event that the judge admonished both sides this week to avoid mentioning in their summations.
The State Supreme Court jury, which began hearing testimony in the long-delayed case last month, also determined that the Port Authority was 68 percent liable for the incident. Separate trials will now be held to determine monetary damages for the plaintiffs.
The trial, which went to the jury on Tuesday, consolidates more than 400 cases, including people injured by the blast, families of the dead and businesses, for the purpose of finding liability.
The agency quickly said it would appeal. "The Port Authority is confident it will prevail," one of its lawyers, Marc Kasowitz, told The Associated Press.
But after the verdict was announced late this afternoon, one of the six jurors, Rafael Garcia, a 33-year-old television executive, said that the decision was the result of "irrefutable evidence."
At the heart of the case was a 1985 Port Authority security report, which said the garage was vulnerable to attack.
Eerily prescient, it held that car bombs were "fast becoming the weapon of choice for European terrorists," and that the public parking area in the trade center was "a definite security risk" because a vehicle filled with explosives could easily enter and park there.
The report recommended closing the public parking area of the garage, and suggested providing guards at entrances, restricting pedestrian entry and conducting random searches of vehicles.
The defense said the Port Authority had nonetheless decided not to close the garage because officials believed the risk of a bombing was low in the garage, compared with the shopping and pedestrian areas. Lawyers for the agency also argued that the bombing was not preventable, and that Port Authority should therefore not be held responsible for the deaths and injuries.
But a panel of outside consultants and in-house security personnel had found that the garage was an easy target for would-be terrorists.
The plaintiffs contended that the agency wanted to avoid the inconvenience and loss of revenue that closing or severely restricting use of the garage would bring.
Several men were convicted and sentenced to long prison terms for the 1993 trade center bombing, including Ramzi Yousef, a Muslim fundamentalist who was considered the mastermind of the attack. In 1988, in two separate trials in New York, Mr. Yousef was sentenced to life without parole.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
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