Ahmed Ressam - Capture

Capture

Ressam rented a dark green 1999 Chrysler 300M luxury sedan, and on the evening of December 13, Ressam and Dahoumane hid the explosives and all the related components in the wheel well in the car's trunk. On December 14, they left Vancouver, traveling to Victoria, British Columbia. Believing that he would draw less scrutiny alone, Ressam sent Dahoumane back to Vancouver, British Columbia by bus.

Ressam then attempted to cross the border by taking the M/V Coho car ferry from Victoria, British Columbia, to Port Angeles, Washington. He successfully passed through U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service checks in Victoria, and boarded the last ferry of the day for the 90-minute crossing to the U.S.

After the ferry docked in Port Angeles at 6 pm, Ressam saw to it that his car was the last one to leave the ferry. Although there had not been any intelligence reports suggesting threats, U.S. Customs inspector Diana Dean decided to have a secondary Customs search conducted of Ressam's car, saying later that Ressam was acting "hinky" and asked him to get out of the car.

At first, Ressam was not cooperative. Dean requested that he fill out a Customs declaration form, which he did listing himself as a Canadian citizen named Benni Noris. He also had a passport, Quebec driver license, and credit cards all in the Noris name, as well as another Quebec driver license with the same date of birth, but in the name "Mario Roig". Royal Canadian Mounted Police later advised that the Mario Roig driver license was a fake, and did not exist on their records.

Another Customs inspector searching his car and unscrewing the covering over the spare tire in his trunk found, hidden in the spare tire well:

• 10 green plastic garbage bags with 118 pounds (54 kg) of a fine white powder (which tests later identified as urea, used to manufacture explosives and fertilizer),
• 2 lozenge bottles filled with primary explosives hexamethylene triperoxide diamine (HMTD) and cyclotrimethylenetrinitramine (RDX),
• 2 plastic bags with 14 pounds (6.4 kg) of a crystalline powder (later shown to be aluminium sulfate, used primarily as a desiccant, to keep things dry),
• two 22-ounce olive jars with 2.6 pounds (1.2 kg) of golden-brown liquid (later identified as secondary explosive ethylene glycol dinitrate (EGDN), an extremely explosive and volatile nitroglycerin equivalent that is twice as powerful as TNT), and
• 4 operational timing devices designed to detonate primary explosives, consisting of small black boxes containing circuit boards connected to Casio watches and 9-volt battery connectors. When the watch alarm would ring, an electrical charge would pass from the battery to a small lightbulb which had had its glass covering removed, exposing the filament; the bulb would heat, ignite, and detonate the other bomb ingredients in a chain reaction.

As one of the Customs inspectors escorted him from the car, Ressam broke free and fled. Inspectors chased him for five to six blocks then, after he tried to force his way into a car stopped at a traffic light, they tackled him and took him into custody.

He was arrested by the U.S. Border Patrol on charges of misrepresentation on entry and failure to be inspected, booked into the Clallam County Jail in Clallam County, Washington, and investigated by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Customs officials searching him and the car also found the phone numbers of Abu Doha and Meskini. His fingerprints were analyzed by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who determined that he was actually "Ahmed Ressam", rather than "Benni Antoine Noris".

An explosives expert concluded that the materials in his car could have produced a blast 40x greater than that of a devastating car bomb. It was ultimately determined that he had intended to detonate the explosives at the Los Angeles International Airport.