FBI Steps Up Probe in Southern Bomb Deaths : Civil rights: Agents, accompanied by the owner, search three properties. Sources say evidence is found.

FBI agents Monday searched a man’s salvage store, warehouse and home around Enterprise, Ala., in an intensified hunt for a suspect in the bombings that killed a federal appeals judge and a civil rights lawyer last month.

The owner of each of the properties is Robert Wayne O’Ferrell, 46, who a government source said had lost a desegregation case decided last April by Judge Robert S. Vance of the 11th circuit court of appeals. Vance died Dec. 16 after opening a package containing a powerful nail bomb at his home in Mountain Brook, Ala.

Physical evidence that could link O’Ferrell or one of the searched locations to the bombs was found, a source close to the investigation said. Sources familiar with the probe emphasized that there had been no arrests, and that O’Ferrell, who accompanied agents to the warehouse Monday, was not in custody.

The bomb that killed Vance was one of four sent in December to targets that all shared some connection to desegregation cases.

On Dec. 18, Robert Robinson, a black alderman and civil rights lawyer in Savannah, Ga., was killed by a similar package bomb. Robinson represented the Savannah NAACP in a long-running school desegregation case there. Similar bombs also were sent to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta and to the office of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People in Jacksonville, Fla., but they were disarmed before they were opened.

Details about O’Ferrell, whose home phone rang busy continuously Monday night, were scant, but one government source described him as “a highly religious person.”

Tina Summerville, who lives close to the warehouse, told the Associated Press that O’Ferrell “was always reading the Bible.”

“They are just average people,” she said. “That’s what makes this so strange.”

FBI agents with bomb-sniffing dogs, along with local police and a bomb squad from Ft. Rucker Army base, searched O’Ferrell’s salvage business and warehouse in Enterprise along with his home in nearby New Brockton.

Warrants issued by a U.S. magistrate in Alabama are expected to shed further light on the basis for the searches when they are made public today.

Agents assigned to the bombing investigation, one of the FBI’s highest priority cases, were told over the weekend to expect six-day work weeks, and an additional 50 were sent to the bureau’s Atlanta office to help pursue leads in the case. Officials at FBI headquarters also worked Saturday and Sunday on the case.

FBI officials have said they believe one or more racists is behind the bombings. In late December, a group calling itself Americans for a Competent Federal Judicial System claimed responsibility for the bombs and threatened to send more. FBI officials and organizations that monitor hate groups say they have no knowledge of such an organization.

Letters sent to victims and potential victims since the bombings indicate that the sender was seeking to retaliate against alleged crimes committed by black people against white people and for victories that blacks have won in court cases in the 11th circuit, which covers Florida, Alabama and Georgia.

The letters specifically cited an Atlanta area case in which two black men are accused of raping a white woman.

Scripps Howard News Service reported Monday night that one of the items the FBI was searching for is an old typewriter with distinctive misshaped letters like those that appeared in the missives.

FBI sources have said physical evidence links those letters to the package bombs.

In a meeting Monday with President Bush and Atty. Gen. Dick Thornburgh, Benjamin L. Hooks, executive director of the NAACP, was told that investigators were making progress and that Thornburgh was hopeful, a White House spokesman said.

Hooks said: “We were fairly well satisfied that the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Justice Department were doing their best.”

White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater said Thornburgh “simply said that we were making progress, that he was hopeful, but he could not give any specifics at that point.”