N.Y. Trial in Rabbi’s Death Planted an Explosive Seed

Day after day in the winter chill of early 1992, a ragtag band of chanting demonstrators gathered outside the criminal courts building in Lower Manhattan, waving signs and hurling protests condemning the treatment of an Arab immigrant charged with killing a militant rabbi.

Among the faces in those crowds were an angry young Palestinian with an expired visa, a tall Arab cabdriver called “Red” by his American friends, and a decorated former Egyptian military officer who was a new arrival within the growing circle of Islamic activists shouting slogans on the sidewalk.

Out of those loud demonstrations of contempt for the U.S. judicial system would emerge what authorities now say was a clandestine cell of terrorists who conspired to set off the World Trade Center bomb blast, plotted an unparalleled wave of attacks on U.S. landmarks and political figures and shattered America’s image of invulnerability to terrorism.

The trail that led from those courthouse steps to the dramatic raid June 24 on a makeshift bomb factory in Queens zigzags through militant mosques, rural shooting ranges and seedy safehouses. It is a trail laid down by dozens of avowed enemies of governments in Israel, Egypt and Afghanistan.

Along the way, the efforts of American investigators were at times frustrated because critical evidence had been overlooked, and at times aided by brilliant detective work, inexplicably good fortune and the still-mysterious cooperation of a stranger with Egyptian military medals.

Senior U.S. officials say they have found no evidence of foreign direction or state-sponsored financial support of the men arrested in the bomb-factory raid. Investigators believe the suspected terrorists could well be amateurs, a loose-knit group of Arab radicals brought together by religious zealotry and feelings of ethnic persecution.

In particular, they were united by outrage over what they perceived as the harsh sentencing of a friend--Egyptian immigrant El Sayyid A. Nosair, accused killer of radical Rabbi Meir Kahane.

And, although President Clinton said last week that Americans should be reassured by the success of investigators in preventing a second round of deadly attacks, counterterrorism experts worry that zealots beyond the control of foreign states may, in fact, pose the greatest terrorist threat on U.S. soil.

One intelligence official, who agreed to be interviewed on condition that he would not be identified, described those arrested in New York as a new breed of terrorists, driven by the exhortations of individual clerics and not necessarily tied to a particular country’s politics.

“They are soldiers in the army of Islam,” said the official, referring to the extremist violent fringe of that religion.

Some of its most radical recruits appear to have come out of the trial of Nosair. In Nosair, says terrorism expert Brian Jenkins of the international investigative agency Kroll Associates, scores of struggling and disaffected Arab immigrants found both “a champion and a victim.”

First came solidarity in the courtroom and in sidewalk protests. Then came long talks until, as Jenkins described it, “someone said ‘enough talk, something must be done.’ ”

In the end, he said, the Nosair trial “was a catalyst” for terrorist action.

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In a wood-paneled meeting room on the second floor of Marriott’s Halloran House Hotel in Midtown Manhattan, Rabbi Kahane had just finished his speech to a crowd of about 100 and was answering questions. On that rainy November night in 1990, many in the room shared Kahane’s radical views on what amounted to ‘ethnic cleansing’--the forcible expulsion of native Palestinians from Jerusalem and other Israeli-controlled areas.

At least one in the crowd disagreed. And he had a gun.

A man later described by witnesses as “smiling and looking strange,” approached the 58-year-old founder of the militant Jewish Defense League and pulled out a .357-caliber handgun. An instant later a bullet slammed into Kahane’s neck. He fell mortally wounded. The gunman fled.

Nosair, a 36-year-old Egyptian immigrant with an American wife, was arrested a few blocks away when he was wounded in an exchange of gunshots with a uniformed postal policeman.

In a press conference later that night, Chief of Detectives Joseph Borelli shrugged off questions about the political implications of the assault, saying: “I don’t know if it’s a political assassination. I’m just taking a homicide (case).”

When police raided Nosair’s rented, two-story brick bungalow across the Hudson River in Cliffside Park, N.J., they discovered extremist Muslim publications and manuals for building bombs. They found photos of the World Trade Center, the Empire State Building and the Washington Monument and the text of a sermon advocating terrorist strikes on American soil.

But much of the evidence was in Arabic and no effort was made to have it translated. Instead, it was stored away by authorities. Detectives pursued what they believed was a simple case of homicide, focusing on the acts of a lone gunman.

For a year leading up to his trial, Nosair was held without bail in a Rikers Island jail cell. He was visited regularly by members of the local Arab community, where his status soared. Money for his defense was sought from the U.S. Muslim community and from as far away as Egypt.

At the time, there was another important fund-raising effort under way among Arab immigrants--a campaign to finance the moujahedeen resistance in pro-Soviet Afghanistan. A principal figure in that effort was radical Egyptian Sheik Omar Abdul Rahman, a blind cleric who also advocated the overthrow of the Hosni Mubarak government in Cairo.

Abdul Rahman had been allowed into the United States even though the State Department had sought to exclude him because of alleged ties to terrorists. The State Department attributes his entry on a visa to a series of errors. American authorities said they were unaware that he was in the New York area until the raid on Nosair’s house turned up references to the controversial cleric and the mosques where he preached in Brooklyn and Jersey City, N.J.

Two weeks after the Kahane killing, amid charges by Kahane followers that he had been the victim of a Muslim plot, the sheik’s visa was revoked and procedures were initiated to deport him.

But documents seized earlier from Nosair’s house linking Nosair, the cleric and other U.S.-based militants in what one senior investigator later would call “a road map” to the World Trade Center bombing sat untranslated in about 50 storage boxes.

It was a second murder case, in the spring of 1991, that again brought the sheik and some of his associates to the attention of authorities.

An Egyptian fund-raiser for the Afghan resistance, accused by Abdul Rahman’s followers of mishandling about $2 million in contributions, was found murdered in his Brooklyn home. For a time, a red-bearded Egyptian cabdriver who chauffeured the sheik was considered a prime suspect in the killing and investigators examined links between Abdul Rahman and the dead man.

Mahmud Abouhalima, the cabdriver, was never charged in the still-unsolved murder, but he was questioned by police and asked about reports that he possessed bombs and explosives. He denied it. The sheik also was questioned at the time but no charges were filed.

In April, 1991, a month after the Brooklyn murder, Abdul Rahman obtained a green card as a religious worker. Like the State Department before it, the Immigration and Naturalization Service said later that it had erred in accommodating the sheik.

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From the beginning, Nosair’s trial in December, 1991, drew large crowds of mostly angry spectators: backers of Nosair on one side, Jewish Kahane supporters on the other. To keep the partisans apart in the courtroom, the judge ordered a rope barrier installed down the center aisle.

In court, the defense, headed by veteran attorney William Kunstler, endeavored to raise doubts about whether it was Nosair who fired the fatal shot. Among those who assisted Kunstler from the Arab community were Siddig Ibrahim Siddig Ali, a Sudanese who speaks flawless English; Ibrahim A. Elgabrowny, a cousin of Nosair’s who managed his defense fund, and Abouhalima, who sometimes chauffeured the legal team.

Others who became regulars at the trial included Emad Ali Salem, a former Egyptian army lieutenant colonel. Through marriage to an American he had become a U.S. citizen three months before the trial opened. He was not, however, a regular at the Brooklyn or Jersey City mosques of Sheik Abdul Rahman and was, therefore, a stranger to many of Nosair’s friends and associates.

Another was Mohammed A. Salameh, a Palestinian bachelor born on the West Bank of the Jordan River three months after it was occupied by Israeli forces in 1967. His visitor’s visa had expired three years earlier.

On Dec. 29, jurors returned with a stunning acquittal on the murder charges. Nosair’s supporters rejoiced, but Judge Alvin Schlesinger called the verdict “devoid of common sense and logic” and declared Nosair’s conduct “figuratively, a rape of this community.”

In January, he sentenced the Egyptian to the maximum possible for convictions on lesser gun charges, up to 22 years in prison.

Nosair was transferred to Attica State Prison as inmate 92A0931, a victim of injustice to throngs of area Muslims who rallied in picket lines outside the court and Schlesinger’s home.

Some, as authorities later would charge, plotted more dramatic steps.

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By the late summer of 1992, federal investigators were picking up rumors of plots and terrorist cells. Most intriguing was a report that militant Muslims were scheming to assassinate the secretary general of the United Nations, Egyptian Boutros Boutros-Ghali. In September, a federal grand jury launched an investigation.

By that time Sheik Abdul Rahman’s green card had been revoked and he had appealed to prevent being deported. Meanwhile, he was free and continued to preach at area mosques, where his fiery sermons and literature vilified the Egyptian government and its protectors. (He surrendered to immigration agents Friday. His resident status was revoked on grounds he posed a danger and might flee.)

In speeches often recorded and smuggled into Egypt, where his followers like to compare him to the late Iranian revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Abdul Rahman called the United States a “den of evil and fornication” and exhorted Muslims to destroy the enemies of Islam. He advocated an Islamic republic for Egypt.

From among worshipers who attended the small mosques where the sheik preached, about 20 men were subpoenaed to answer questions about terrorist plots. Among them was Salem, the former Egyptian colonel.

Salem had become close to the sheik after the Nosair trial, volunteering as a bodyguard and translator. In his early 40s, Salem was older and more securely established in his adopted country than many of the young bachelor immigrants. And his proximity to the sheik added to his stature. He became a trusted member of the sheik’s inner circle.

Although Salem claimed to have been a bodyguard for assassinated Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, killed by extremists linked to Sheik Abdul Rahman, the former military officer explained that he had a change of heart after witnessing Egyptian torture. He kept pictures of torture victims among his family albums.

Publicly, Salem complained about the subpoena and said he was questioned about militants in the immigrant community. Authorities seemed especially interested in “Red”--Abouhalima--whose picture they hung on the wall. Privately, Salem seemed agreeable in September to help the FBI in its efforts to penetrate the mosques, according to a senior law enforcement official.

Also in September, one of the newest immigrants to join the Jersey City mosque arrived at John F. Kennedy Airport on a flight from Pakistan. He had no visa, told immigration officials that he bribed his way aboard the jetliner with $2,700, and requested political asylum. He was admitted, pending a hearing set for the end of the year.

What officials did not realize was that Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, 25, had been traveling with a companion on a trip that originated in Iraq and that the pair had been carrying manuals containing bomb-making instructions. His fingerprints would be discovered on those manuals--but not until after the trade center bombing and after he had apparently fled the country.

By the fall of 1992, according to details of the federal bomb conspiracy case in court documents, the plot to deliver terrorism to the streets of New York apparently was under way.

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They came together just across the Hudson River from the towering World Trade Center, meeting in homes, at the mosque, at the Islamic Center where many immigrants received their mail from families in the Middle East.

In November, Salameh, the young Palestinian, rented a Jersey City self-storage unit using an alias. It would become the factory for a car bomb, according to investigators.

In January, again using an alias, Salameh rented an apartment with Yousef, the Iraqi. One of the bedrooms would be used as a chemical lab, investigators said, leaving the walls splattered with blue traces of suspected bomb ingredients.

Sometimes the accused conspirators traveled three hours to rural Pennsylvania to practice target shooting at a gun range. Other times, test detonations were conducted in the countryside.

Also in January, Sheik Abdul Rahman appeared before an immigration judge, fighting for permission to stay in the United States. Meanwhile, in sermons, he was spreading what defense attorneys would call nothing more than fiery rhetoric, preaching that “Muslims must kill the enemies of Allah, in every way and everywhere, in order to liberate themselves from the grandchildren of the pigs and apes who are educated at the table of Zionists, Communists and Imperialists.”

By mid-February, the massive chemical bomb that would kill six and injure more than 1,000 at the trade center was being brewed in barrels hidden in the Jersey City storage unit.

Meanwhile, stored in boxes in an FBI locker, still waiting to be translated, were the documents that would help unravel a plot to blow up the United Nations, the George Washington Bridge, the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, the Empire State Building and the Washington Monument.

But not before a 1,200-pound bomb blew open a crater in the World Trade Center parking garage on Feb. 26.

In the aftermath of the worst terrorist attack ever on American soil, two critical events took place. Law enforcement sources report that the FBI finally opened the boxes, scrambling for clues hidden in the Arabic text. And Salem, saying he abhorred the violence of the blast, became a full-time informer.

The man they called “the colonel” wore a hidden microphone as he moved in the inner circle of the sheik. There, for the first time, federal agents heard firsthand as another plot evolved.

Together, the long-ignored documents and the spy prevented what authorities say would have been the most audacious terrorist assault in the history of the country.

Salameh, Elgabrowny and Abouhalima face charges in the trade center bombing. Yousef is still at large. Siddig Ali, believed to be the ringleader for the plot to bomb New York landmarks, has also been arrested.

* SHEIK’S DETENTION: Egyptians are divided over the detention in New York of Sheik Omar Abdul Rahman. A22