Profile : French Judge Wields Powerful Form of Justice : * He was the first to link Libyans to airline bombings. His tough style is admired, but he has critics too.

He works behind bullet-proof glass windows in a tiny office hidden on one of the obscure, upper floors of the old Palais de Justice. He has no permanent staff except for a secretary. Stacks of working files litter his standard government-issue desk.

Yet in terms of power and influence, French Judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere, the man who first made the Libyan connection in the terrorist sabotage of French and American airliners, including the December, 1988, bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, would be the envy of even the most highly placed American judge or prosecutor. How many American judges, for example, can single-handedly order searches and wiretaps, interrogate witnesses, issue indictments and then arrest, judge and condemn suspects? How many can affect their country’s foreign policy? Cause presidents to postpone summits? Bruguiere does all this and more.

The most celebrated of France’s 570 juges d’instruction --a uniquely French legal combination of judge and crusading district attorney--Bruguiere enjoys nearly unlimited use of police investigators, espionage agents and diplomats. If he wants to fly to Brazzaville, Congo, as he did several times this year, he simply phones up the Ministry of Justice and asks for a ticket and spending money.

“I don’t have to tell them why I am going or certainly not what I did when I come back,” Bruguiere explained recently during an interview in his office. “I simply ask for what I need for my investigation.”

Over the last two years, the stocky, sixth-generation French jurist has made 15 international trips in pursuit of leads in the 1989 bombing of a French airliner over the African desert. He even ordered French police technicians to make a movie of his investigation, with himself, Judge Bruguiere, smoking his cherrywood pipe and looking contemplative, in the featured role.

In the same investigation, he had the wreckage of a bomb-shattered French jetliner removed from the Sahara desert, reassembled at a military base in France and blown up again to try to duplicate the effects of the original explosion.

As France’s chief investigative magistrate probing Middle East terrorism, Bruguiere handles the country’s most politically sensitive cases. The latest hot files-- dossiers chauds --are those of the assassination last summer of former Iranian Prime Minister Shahpour Bakhtiar and the 1989 terrorist bombing of a French Union des Transports Aeriens (UTA) DC-10 airliner.

Bruguiere’s development of a Libyan connection in the UTA bombing was done in cooperation with American investigators probing the Lockerbie Pan Am bombing. But Bruguiere struck first against the Libyans, issuing four international arrest warrants at the end of October. He also struck much higher in the Libyan government, naming two senior officials, including the brother-in-law of Libyan ruler Col. Moammar Kadafi, earlier this month.

After taking the initiative, the French jurist waited anxiously for the Americans and British investigators to join him on the front against Libya, as they did late last week by announcing indictments against two low-level Libyan agents.

Unlike the United States--where, as soon as the indictments were announced, President Bush made it clear that he would seek some sort of international revenge against Libya--the French government has essentially ignored the findings of Bruguiere. The French judge, feeling isolated, welcomed company on the international legal front. He hoped to relieve some of the political pressure he was feeling when it was “Judge Bruguiere vs. Libya.”

“If there are some indictments against the Libyans in the Lockerbie case,” said a source close to the French investigation before the American and British indictments were announced last Thursday, “there could be a boomerang effect in France, and the French government would be forced to act.”

Just as the judge had hoped, on Friday, the day after the indictments dropped in Washington and Edinburgh, Scotland, French President Francois Mitterrand announced that France was discussing with the United States and Britain joint action that might be taken against Libya.

“We know enough to say there is a Libyan responsibility,” Mitterrand said during a news conference in Bonn, where he was meeting with German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. “We are starting to have the results of the reflections, investigations and conclusions of the investigative magistrate. They all seem to jointly confirm a Libyan responsibility.”

The problem is that Judge Bruguiere’s reflections, investigations and conclusions are not always convenient for the French government, where there are grumblings that the judge is a publicity-mad, loose cannon who interferes with French diplomacy.

In the Bakhtiar case, for example, Bruguiere placed the blame directly on the Iranian government at a time when France was attempting to re-establish relations with the Tehran government of President Hashemi Rafsanjani. After Bruguiere issued an international arrest warrant for a senior Iranian official in late October, French President Francois Mitterrand had to delay indefinitely a trip to Tehran that the president had hoped would be the first to Iran by a major Western head of state since the fall of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi in 1979.

Likewise, Bruguiere’s recent warrants in the UTA case against senior Libyan officials, including Kadafi brother-in-law Abdullah Senoussi, have put into question French plans, announced recently by Foreign Minister Roland Dumas, to “turn a new page” in relations with Libya.

Coming in the same week, the issuing of international warrants involving Iran and Libya have put Bruguiere in a political hot seat in France. Opposition newspapers and news magazines have proclaimed him a hero, the incorruptible scourge of terrorism who has embarrassed the ruling French Socialist Party government.

“Judge Bruguiere, bete noire of French diplomacy,” headlined the moderate right-wing newspaper, Quotidien de Paris, in a Nov. 1 article. Comparisons of Bruguiere to the beloved Commissaire Maigret, brooding police detective hero of more than 60 books by Georges Simenon, as well as dozens of movies and countless television episodes, flow freely from adoring journalists’ pens.

Not immune to good press, Bruguiere, 48, likes to talk about the superior “intuitive sense” of the French investigator. “There is an intuitive side that the Anglo-Saxons don’t have,” he said during the recent interview. The Americans and the British have superior resources and technology, he said, but the French have “an intuitive sense that gives them the possibility for rapid analysis and synthesis.”

The judge’s critics, meanwhile, gag on the Maigret comparison. “The only thing that Judge Bruguiere and Maigret have in common is they both smoke a pipe,” snorted one French official who declined to be quoted by name. “I take that back. The only two things Bruguiere and Maigret have in common are the pipe and a lack of modesty.”

But opposition deputies in the National Assembly have taken up the judge’s banner, demanding that France at least withdraw its ambassadors from Iran and Libya until the two terrorism cases are resolved. After the government refused to officially cancel Mitterrand’s planned visit to Iran in October, saying that it has only been “delayed,” Assembly member Nicole Catala exploded:

“Where is the honor of France in all this? Is it necessary to pay with the blood of Iranian refugees living here (Paris) to satisfy the desire of Mr. Mitterrand to be the first Western head of state to visit Iran?”

Publicly, the government response has been low-key. “A legal procedure is under way, and we would not be able to anticipate its conclusions,” said a taut-lipped secretary of state for foreign affairs, Alain Vivien.

But offstage, official rage against the judge is overflowing. “What is really behind all this,” said one official close to the debate, “is that for some reason the judge wants to show that the Quai d’Orsay (the French Foreign Ministry) dines with the devil and condones terrorism. That is absurd and absolutely false.”

The result is a tense battle of institutions between the Foreign Ministry, where the elite corps of diplomats are used to getting their way, and the judicial system, which grants French investigative magistrates like Bruguiere nearly unlimited power to investigate, indict and judge crimes with very little review. Simple elements of due process, such as the right to bail and a preliminary hearing before an impartial judge, do not exist in the French system.

It is not the first time since Napoleon established the juges d’instruction 180 years ago that their wide discretionary power has come into question. An unsuccessful move was made by former Justice Minister Robert Badinter in 1985 to replace the individual judges, often young and inexperienced, with three-judge panels.

Bruguiere, using the French equivalent to the American “extraterritoriality” statute that allows overseas investigation and prosecution of cases involving American nationals, has turned the Napoleonic-era job into jet-age criminal justice. But Badinter complained in 1985 that the idea of the all-powerful investigative magistrate dated to the time of “stagecoaches and sailing ships.”

In his career, Bruguiere has successfully directed some of France’s most sensational cases, almost all involving extensive international travel.

In 1980, for example he traveled to Japan to chase leads in the case of an upper-class Japanese student in Paris who murdered and then cannibalized his Dutch girlfriend. From 1982-87 he led the investigation-prosecution of Direct Action, the bloody, home-grown French terrorist organization. That probe took him to most of the other countries of Western Europe, where he met with other terrorist specialists. In 1987, his Paris apartment was booby-trapped with a grenade bomb that his police guards managed to disarm. Since then the judge has carried a gun.

“I was probably the first juge d’instruction --mainly because I have been involved in the struggle against terrorism since 1981--to systematize a system of international relations,” Bruguiere said.

The constant travel away from his cell-like office in the Palais de Justice is ridiculed by some of his colleagues as “judicial tourism.” But it has also won him the respect of criminal justice officials in other countries, including the Justice Department of the United States, where he is praised for his courageous use of his wide powers to battle terrorism.

But not everyone loves Bruguiere. There are some in the French government, particularly friends of Foreign Minister Roland Dumas at the Quai d’Orsay, who wish the peripatetic French jurist would stay home and mind his own business.

“Judge Bruguiere is not the foreign minister,” one such foe commented sarcastically. “Roland Dumas is not a judge. Judge Bruguiere makes investigations. Bravo! Roland Dumas makes foreign policy. Bravo!”

Times staff writer Ron Ostrow in Washington contributed to this report.

Judge Bruguiere’s Biggest Cases The Case of the Japanese Cannibal

* On June 11, 1981, Dutch student Renee Hartevelt, 25, was invited by Japanese student Issei Sagawa, 32, to his Paris apartment to translate poetry. After she refused his advances, Sagawa shot her to death and cut her body into pieces, which he stored in his refrigerator and ate over a period of weeks. Bruguiere traveled to Japan to trace Sagawa’s upper-class background for clues. After expert testimony, Sagawa was declared criminally insane and released to Japanese authorities. He has since been declared “totally sane” by Japanese psychiatrists and released.

Taking Direct Action Against Terrorism

* For eight years beginning in 1979, the home-grown French terrorist organization Direct Action-- Action Directe --conducted a series of bloody terrorist attacks that included five killings and at least 80 bombings. Among those killed were a French Ministry of Defense official, the president of the automobile giant Renault and three police officers. Bruguiere took over the case in 1982, traveling across Europe developing leads. In February, 1987, the terrorism ended with the arrest in a remote farmhouse near Orleans of the four principal Direct Action members. In the following trial before Bruguiere they were convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Who Bombed the Brazzaville Plane?

* On Sept. 19, 1989, a French DC-10 airliner on the way from Brazzaville, Congo, to Paris with a stop in N’Djamena, Chad, exploded over the Sahara Desert country of Niger, killing all 171 passengers and crew members. Chasing leads in Africa and Europe, Bruguiere late last month announced international arrest warrants for four Libyan officials, including Abdallah Senoussi, the No. 2 official in Libyan intelligence and brother-in-law to Libyan leader Col. Moammar Kadafi. The case is believed linked to the December, 1988, bombing of a Pan Am jumbo jetliner over Lockerbie, Scotland.

The Trail That Led to Tehran

* Last Aug. 6, three Iranian men entered the heavily guarded Paris apartment of former Iranian Prime Minister Shahpour Bakhtiar, a longtime target of fundamentalist terrorists. The men slit the throat of Bakhtiar, the last prime minister of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, and stabbed to death Bakhtiar’s personal secretary before escaping. Late last month, Bruguiere issued international arrest warrants for an adviser to the Iranian government, Hussein Sheikhattar, as “an accomplice in murder and criminal conspiracy in connection with a terrorist action.” Bruguiere’s investigation into the Bakhtiar killing resulted in the postponement of a long-planned visit to Tehran by French President Francois Mitterrand.

Terror on the Rue des Rosiers

* On Aug. 9, 1982, Palestinian terrorists affiliated with the Abu Nidal group attacked Jo Goldenberg’s Delicatessen in an old Jewish neighborhood of the Marais district. After setting off an explosion in the front dining room, two men entered the restaurant with guns, spraying bullets in all directions. Six people were killed and 22 injured. As the judge assigned to the case, Bruguiere developed the Abu Nidal connection and began his specialization in Middle East terrorism.