Ali Hassan Abu Kamal was a 69-year-old Palestinian English teacher. He was born in
Jaffa in
Mandate Palestine on September 19, 1927. He was the son of a refugee family that fled the city during the
1948 Arab–Israeli War and resettled in
Gaza. He became a well-respected English teacher at a local high school and a university, and he was also a well-paid tutor and accomplished translator. He earned about $3,000 a month and lived in an affluent neighborhood with his wife, and had six children. In 1996, he decided his family should relocate to the United States for a better life. He obtained a legal nonimmigrant visa and arrived in New York on December 24, 1996. Fathiya Abu Kamal told the press: My husband is not a terrorist, he was just hopeless. He was aged, he had nothing to do with politics, or terrorism, or crime. In February 2007, 10 years after the shooting, the
New York Daily News reported that Abu Kamal's daughter, Linda, was "tired of lying" about her father's motives for the attack. She told the
Daily News that her father wanted to punish the U.S. for supporting Israel and revealed that her mother's 1997 account was a cover story fabricated by the
Palestinian Authority: A Palestinian Authority official advised us to say the attack was not for political reasons because that would harm the peace agreement with Israel. We didn't know that he was martyred for patriotic motivations, so we repeated what we were told to do.... His goal was patriotic. He wanted to take revenge from the Americans, the British, the French and the Israelis.... He wrote that after he raised his children and made sure that his family was all right he decided to avenge in the highest building in America to make sure they get his message. ==Aftermath==