Band of ‘Nobodies’ at Center of N.Y. Probe : Bombing: Immigrants upset by Kahane case could be part of a well-organized terrorist cell, officials say.

Even their allies dismissed them as “nobodies.”

They were just a small band of young immigrants upset that a member of their mosque had been sentenced to a long jail term despite being acquitted of the murder of Jewish right-wing leader Meir Kahane.

They staged a few small street demonstrations. They raised some money for the convicted man’s family and legal fees. But nobody--except perhaps a few shrill followers of Kahane--ever seemed to take them seriously until federal authorities this week linked the group to the Feb. 26 bombing of the World Trade Center.

Now, three men related to this group have been arrested in connection with the bombing--Mohammed A. Salameh, Nidal Ayyad and Ibrahim A. Elgabrowny. Federal agents are investigating whether they could be part of a well-organized terrorist cell with possible links to international extremist groups.

“I think we are finding that their tentacles are more widespread,” Rep. Charles E. Shumer (D-N.Y.) said.

Federal law enforcement authorities have long known about this group of followers of Sheik Omar Abdul Rahman, a blind cleric who was suspected but acquitted of playing a role in the slaying of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat more than a decade ago.

Although their backgrounds are very different, the men seem to have one thing in common--they were supporters of El Sayyid A. Nosair, the man who was acquitted of the November, 1990, slaying of Kahane in New York but was convicted on related weapons charges. He could be released from prison in as little as five years.

Kahane, a radical rabbi who advocated violence and called for the expulsion of Palestinians from Israel, had passed his peak of political influence when he was gunned down. His American movement, which was suspected in several bombings connected to its effort to free Soviet Jews, lost steam when he was jailed for a year for conspiring to make bombs.

In 1971 he moved to Israel and, after two unsuccessful attempts, became a member of the Israeli Parliament. But his party was banned in 1985.

As the mysteries of the World Trade Center bombing unfold, FBI officials have admitted that since Kahane’s murder, they have kept under surveillance members of an amorphous group with ties to Nosair and Abdul Rahman.

Kahane Chai, a radical group still fighting for justice in the rabbi’s murder, claims that if federal officials had been more diligent in trying to find out who was involved in the Kahane murder, the World Trade Center would never have been bombed.

At a small but noisy demonstration organized by Kahane Chai not far from the Trade Center on Thursday, New York state Assemblyman Dov Hikind, a Brooklyn Democrat and an orthodox Jew, said the FBI’s “hands are also covered with the blood of the victims of the World Trade Center bombing.”

Robert Louden, an instructor at the city’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice who has been consulted on the trade center bombing, said that the FBI has limitations.

“Any investigative effort has finite resources,” Louden said. “Just because the FBI said they had some of these guys under surveillance, it does not mean they’re being watched all the time.”

Although it appears that the suspects received tens of thousands of dollars from abroad, it is still unclear whether an international terrorist ring supported the local suspects.

“They are nobodies here,” said M. T. Mehdi, a leader of the Arab-American community in New York and the spokesman for Abdul Rahman, “but they may have had some ties with (terrorist) groups outside America.”

Egyptian officials say activities of the Nosair supporters suggest the existence of a cell patterned after those that have terrorized Cairo. There, effective surveillance by counterterrorism agents has often been limited because individuals in one cell have virtually no knowledge about or contact with those in other cells. When terrorists are captured, they often are unable to provide much useful data, even when under great pressure to cooperate.

“One member of a cell takes orders from someone in another cell, while that person gets orders from someone else. No one person has a clear view of the entire network,” said a former Egyptian government official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

In such an organization, most of the individual activists would not know who was the commander in chief, who was doing the strategic planning or who was financing the activities.

Those arrested so far in New Jersey on bombing-related charges appeared to be part of “a typical cell organization,” the official said, making it difficult for investigators to trace any terrorist conspiracy beyond those who participated directly.

Another Egyptian official, Abdulaleem El-Abyad, minister of information for Egypt’s United Nations mission, sees poor, working-class areas like Jersey City and Brooklyn as prime recruiting grounds for radical spiritual leaders like Abdul Rahman.

“My impression is that they are mostly recent immigrants . . . uprooted from their homes who don’t understand this country. They’re disappointed that they have not found the economic opportunities they expected. They’re alienated,” he said.

“A man like (Abdul) Rahman comes along telling them they are good, they are the best people, and they are captivated.”