U.S. Aid to Afghan Rebels Proves a Deadly Boomerang : Terrorism: World Trade Center bombing is traceable to Islamic veterans of the Asian conflict, experts say.

The peaceful stretch of Atlantic Avenue is dotted with small markets selling spices, baklava and imported goods to women whose heads are covered by scarves and to men in white robes. They cross paths with more typical urban passersby. It scarcely seems a gathering place for terrorists.

Yet the trail of evidence in the World Trade Center blast and an alleged plot to unleash a second wave of bombings in New York can be traced to two graffiti-stained buildings on this block in Brooklyn.

Inside the first, the Al-Farooq mosque, devout Muslim men knelt in a high-ceilinged room on the second floor to pray and listen to a blind Egyptian cleric’s angry call to religious warfare.

Up the stairs a few doors away is a dingy office with a single desk and folding chairs. Here, many of those same men watched videotaped images of violence in Afghanistan and collected money for the holy war, or jihad.

Some were stirred to fight. They went to Pakistan for training paid for by the CIA, then slipped across the border into Afghanistan to confront the Soviets. Many returned changed. They were heroes, assured of a place in paradise. Devotion hardened into zealotry.

“This is the ultimate honor for a true Muslim,” Clement Rodney Hampton-El reportedly said when he came back to Brooklyn in 1989 after being wounded in Afghanistan. “I want to recover and go back to Afghanistan to achieve enlightenment and then die while striving.”

Hampton-El never went back. Instead, authorities said, he and others with ties to the Afghanistan war and the blind cleric, Sheik Omar Abdul Rahman, brought the jihad to the streets of New York.

As they sift through the evidence and try to reconstruct what happened, the FBI and the CIA are examining links between the Afghan resistance movement and suspects in the Trade Center attack and the alleged bomb plot, according to U.S. law enforcement and intelligence officials.

Egypt’s chief foreign policy adviser has gone so far as to assert that the Trade Center bombing was planned in Afghanistan and that Arab veterans of the war and Iranian intelligence agents were involved. But U.S. officials said they do not yet have evidence confirming the claim.

FBI officials do say, however, that Islamic extremism is now the top terrorist threat in the United States. And both here and abroad, terrorism experts and government authorities expressed fear that Arab veterans of the Afghan war form the nucleus of terrorist organizations not only in the United States but also in Egypt and other Arab countries where radicals seek to overthrow moderate governments.

To them, the aid that the United States provided to the Islamic insurgency in Afghanistan has boomeranged. U.S. arms and money were directed by the CIA to the most effective Afghan rebel groups, which turned out to be virulently anti-American Islamic fundamentalists.

With the war over and the veterans dispersed around the globe, there are concerns that trained militants stand ready to answer the call of a handful of extremist religious leaders. The result is a potent mixture of religious zealotry and military experience that a U.S. intelligence official warned has created an army of Islamic soldiers.

Speaking of the veterans, Brian Jenkins, a terrorism expert, said: “If you are sitting in a cafe in Cairo or a coffee shop in Brooklyn, you would say that the United States--despite its protests that it has no quarrel with Islam--is very much in a hostile relationship with your religion. And you might be inclined to act, if summoned.”

But Middle East experts and many Muslims cautioned that those who see mosques as dens of terrorism misjudge the Islamic religion and are guilty of discrimination that would not be tolerated if directed at another group.

There is a grim irony in the idea that a remote and apparently risk-free U.S. foreign policy success on a distant Cold War front years ago may now, at least indirectly, be paying fearsome dividends at home. But the warning signals were there from the beginning.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late 1979 provided the Ronald Reagan Administration with a perfect chance to confront Moscow through proxies. Funneling aid through Pakistan’s intelligence service, the United States had provided $3.3 billion in money and weapons by the end of the decade to the Afghan resistance, known as the moujahedeen .

The goal originally was not so much to oust Soviet forces but to make them pay a heavy price for the invasion.

“The maximum achievement would be to make the cost of Soviet presence extremely high so that they would learn a lesson and be discouraged from trying in other more important places,” said a former State Department official involved in the policy. “That meant we did not pay attention to who got the arms because we did not think there would be a post-Soviet Afghanistan.”

The CIA and State Department knew as early as 1982 that the bulk of the assistance was going to Islamic fundamentalist organizations that were anti-American or had ties to the anti-American government in Iran, according to declassified intelligence reports.

As much as 70% of the assistance at times was going to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, an Islamic radical who had fled Afghanistan in 1973 after being accused of killing a leftist student at Kabul University, according to the reports.

“Hekmatyar was getting more weapons and money because he was better at killing Russians,” said Barnett R. Rubin, director of Central Asia studies at Columbia University. “That means we strengthened someone for a short-term gain and created an infrastructure which in the long term is operating against our interests.”

Arab veterans of the Afghan jihad have already been blamed for violence in Algeria, Egypt and Tunisia. In Algeria, Afghan veterans have led a terrorist campaign that has killed large numbers of police officers, government officials and intellectuals. Last year, Egyptian secret police uncovered a fledgling organization of Afghan veterans allegedly planning to assassinate top government officials and establish a network of Muslim extremists.

Now, as FBI agents study the Trade Center attack and the alleged bomb plot, U.S. interests--and security--appear to have collided with that once-distant legacy.

Hampton-El is only one of many Muslim men from Brooklyn who went to Afghanistan for the jihad. Among the others is an Egyptian cab driver named Mahmud Abouhalima, one of the suspects now being held in connection with the Trade Center attack.

Like Hampton-El, Abouhalima worshiped at the Al Farooq mosque. He also spent many hours helping run the Moujahedeen Service Center, a fund-raising and recruitment center for the Afghan resistance. Its office was in the dingy room a few doors away from the mosque.

While Hampton-El made only a single trip to Afghanistan, friends said Abouhalima traveled there several times, probably carrying money raised at the Atlantic Avenue office to Peshawar, Pakistan, the staging area for the Afghan resistance.

In Peshawar, as happened with many of their colleagues, Hampton-El and Abouhalima signed on with the forces of Hekmatyar, according to a senior law enforcement official.

Another believer in the jihad linked to Hekmatyar was Abdul Rahman, whose call to arms had made him a controversial figure in his homeland of Egypt and eventually thrust him into the center of the investigation into the Trade Center blast and the alleged bombing plot.

The sheik made several trips to Pakistan to meet with Afghan resistance leaders, according to State Department records and interviews. Two sources said Abdul Rahman met with Hekmatyar in Peshawar and that he used his religious position to help recruit young Arab men to join the jihad. A book of the sheik’s sermons was seized last year by Egyptian security police when they broke up the alleged ring of Afghan war veterans plotting assassinations.

An Afghan exile now living in the United States, who would not allow his name to be used because of fears for his family in Kabul, said he had seen Hekmatyar and Abdul Rahman together in May, 1990. State Department records confirm that Abdul Rahman was in Pakistan at the time.

“Hekmatyar and Sheik Omar shared a passion for the Afghan war and for the spread of the Islamic religion,” said the exile, a Muslim who said he opposes Hekmatyar and other fundamentalists.

Soon after the meeting, Abdul Rahman came to United States. He arrived in July, 1990 at the invitation of Mustafa Shalabi, a founder of the Moujahedeen Service Center. Friends said Shalabi admired the sheik’s preachings and wanted his assistance in raising money for the Afghan resistance.

With Shalabi’s help, Abdul Rahman began to preach at the Al Farooq mosque and a mosque in Jersey City, N.J., igniting the fervor of immigrants and U.S.-born Muslims. Among them were Hampton-El and Abouhalima.

Less than a year later, Abdul Rahman and Shalabi had a falling out. Friends of Shalabi said the dispute involved how to spend donations coming in from advertisements across the United States and, more importantly, Abdul Rahman’s escalating rhetoric against moderate Arab leaders.

Shalabi objected to the sheik “encouraging Arab-Americans to use force against the leaders of Islamic countries,” said another Islamic religious leader in Brooklyn.

In March, 1991, Shalabi was murdered in his Brooklyn apartment. The crime has never been solved, although police once said the prime suspect was Abouhalima, the Afghan war veteran who for a time was almost inseparable from the sheik, driving him, cleaning for him and taking care of his personal needs. Some associates of Shalabi have said they are convinced that the sheik was behind the murder.

The relationship between the sheik, Abouhalima and the Afghan resistance was thrust back under the investigative microscope on Feb. 26, when a 1,200-pound bomb blasted a crater in the parking garage of the Trade Center.

Seven of the eight suspects arrested in the bombing were followers of Abdul Rahman. Among them was Abouhalima, who was identified by the FBI as a ringleader in the conspiracy and was arrested after fleeing to Egypt. A second suspect, Ahmad Ajaj, also had traveled to Afghanistan to, as he told reporters, “purify my soul.”

Four months later, eight Muslim men were arrested in what the FBI said was a major plot to rock New York with a series of bombs and assassinate Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. All eight suspects were followers of the sheik.

Abdul Rahman has not been charged in either case but is appealing efforts by U.S. immigration officials to expel him from this country for having an illegal visa. After the discovery of the alleged bomb plot, federal officials said they feared that he would flee and took him into custody.

Hekmatyar, now Afghanistan’s prime minister, Saturday offered refuge to Abdul Rahman, if he is deported. “We are willing to give him refuge. It will not cause a problem for Afghanistan,” he told the Reuters news agency.

Although the sheik and 16 accused terrorists are behind bars, federal authorities are more concerned than ever about the potential for violence spawned by religious fervor born in Afghanistan and nourished by fiery preaching in the United States.

“I’d be a damn fool if I didn’t say there was a heightened concern about Islamic terrorism,” said Wayne Gilbert, assistant director of the FBI and head of its counterterrorism and intelligence division. “There are Islamic fundamentalists in America who are very law-abiding. We have to separate out those who are terrorists.”

Times staff writers Kim Murphy in Cairo and Mark Fineman in Nicosia, Cyprus contributed to this story.