Motive Behind Trade Center Bombing Remains a Mystery : Investigation: Some aspects of the case link the attack to international terrorism, but others point to more local concerns.

Three weeks after a massive explosion killed six people and damaged one of New York City’s most prominent landmarks, the motive behind the bombing of the World Trade Center remains, if anything, more mysterious than ever.

Tracking leads on the East Coast, in Europe and in the Middle East, investigators have turned up a mass of evidence and have focused attention on a motley array of characters worthy of a detective novel: the sheik, the prison inmate, the scientist, the immigrant foot soldiers.

But there does not yet appear to be what prosecutors would call a unifying theory of the case: Among others, there are the terrorism theory, the escape-plot theory and the internecine-feud theory.

Was the bombing foreign-inspired terrorism, as some of the past week’s revelations about money transfers from overseas and the apparent hasty flight of a key suspect to Pakistan might suggest? If so, then by what foreign government or organization?

There have been hints that the bombing may have been a terrorist-motivated outgrowth of political developments involving Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Palestinians or the Afghan resistance movement.

“We are still leaning toward the terrorism theory,” a senior federal investigator said Friday. “The month of March was supposed to be a time of holy war against the West and the United States. . . . We had been hearing that for some time, way before the bombing, from our intelligence people.”

Several aspects of the case lend weight to the terrorism theory, including the fact that the bombing took place on the second anniversary of the liberation of Kuwait and the end of the Persian Gulf War against Iraq.

In another vein, the arrested suspects were adherents of Sheik Omar Abdul Rahman, the spiritual leader of Egypt’s banned Jihad revolutionary group. Abdul Rahman supported the assassination of Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat and has said he favors the slaying of current President Hosni Mubarak, but he has publicly denounced the bombing and has not been charged in the case.

Also, the sheik and at least one of his adherents had some apparent ties to Afghan moujahedeen resistance groups.

The bombing also took place at a time of intense protests in the Middle East over Israel’s deportation of Palestinians from the occupied territories.

However, nothing solid has yet come to public light to directly link the bombing to any of these terrorist theories.

“At this time, we have no evidence, no link to a foreign connection,” a senior U.S. government specialist on terrorism said this week. And in any case, what was the reason for targeting the trade center?

Some independent experts said they are convinced that the bombing ultimately will be shown to have been a terrorist incident.

“The Iranians are engaged in a policy of expanding their control in the entire (Mideast) region, and they want the United States to stay out of it,” said Boston University professor Elie Krakowski, who worked in the Pentagon on both counterterrorism and support for the Afghan resistance movement during the Ronald Reagan Administration.

It looks as if the instigators of the bombing “are using several layers of cutouts (to hide their actions),” Krakowski said. He suggested that those who directed the bombing may have a political motive that is more general than specific. “You send the message that even the United States is not immune (from terrorism), and then you cut off and say: ‘Who, me?’ ”

At the moment, however, the evidence for terrorism that has been publicly divulged remains mostly speculative, and federal investigators have found other clues suggesting that the bombing might conceivably have been prompted by more local concerns.

For example, the discovery in a Brooklyn apartment of five fake Nicaraguan passports for El Sayyid A. Nosair, currently an inmate at New York’s Attica State Prison, and his family raises at least the possibility that the bombing could have been part of some extortion plot to free Nosair--perhaps demonstrating that those advocating his release have the ability to cause destruction as a prelude to demanding his release.

Nosair has been sentenced to up to 22 years in prison for crimes stemming from the 1990 murder of Meir Kahane, the right-wing Jewish leader and former head of the Jewish Defense League.

All three of the suspects who have been arrested in the New York bombing case had made prison visits to Nosair and one of them, Ibrahim A. Elgabrowny, his cousin, had raised money for Nosair’s trial and was active in his defense.

But if the trade center bombing was aimed merely at freeing Nosair, then how did he manage to persuade other people to drive dangerous explosives around New York City on behalf of his personal campaign to get out of prison?

And what was the reason for a series of payments from abroad into the accounts of two of the arrested men, Mohammed A. Salameh and Nidal Ayyad, in the weeks before the explosion?

The theory that the bombing was an outgrowth of some internecine feud grows out of the fact that Abdul Rahman, at whose mosque the arrested suspects worshiped, has engaged in nasty, even deadly, fights with some of his rivals. It remains at least conceivable that some unknown individual or office in the trade center was targeted for attack.

When he first came to the United States, the sheik settled in Brooklyn and worked closely with an Egyptian associate named Mustafa Shalabi on a charity group that had raised money for the Afghan resistance.

Last year, the Wall Street Journal reported that these two men had become bitter enemies because the sheik wanted to redirect the Brooklyn-based charity toward his own cause of creating an Islamic state in Egypt.

In March, 1990, Shalabi was shot and stabbed to death only days before he reportedly planned to flee the country. No one has been charged with the murder, and Abdul Rahman claims that he never met Shalabi.

The sheik also has denied any connection to the trade center bombing. When asked in one TV interview this week why it is that “wherever you go, people end up dead,” the sheik replied:

“We can never call for violence. We call for love, forgiveness and tolerance. But if we are aggressed against, if our land is usurped, we must call for hitting the attacker and the aggressor to put an end to aggression.”

Yet, if the bombing of the trade center is an outgrowth of some feud among various people or groups inside the United States, what is the explanation for the series of wire transfers from abroad?

Federal investigators have found that tens of thousands of dollars was sent from a bank account in Germany to accounts held by Salameh, who rented the van that authorities say was used to bring the bomb into the trade center, and Ayyad, the young Rutgers University engineer whom authorities believe helped in manufacturing the bomb.

Finding the original sources of the money could help explain whether any foreign government or organization directed the bombing. Federal investigators acknowledge that they are trying to see whether any of the money wired from Germany came from other countries.