Judge Upholds Order to Deport Sheik Rahman : Terrorism: Blind cleric’s plea for political asylum also is turned down. A decision to appeal the rulings is pending.

A federal judge Monday found reasonable grounds to deport Sheik Omar Abdul Rahman, whose followers were among those arrested in the bombing of the World Trade Center and in an alleged conspiracy to blow up the United Nations and other key New York sites.

U.S. District Judge Charles L. Brieant in White Plains dismissed an appeal of the deportation order in a 48-page ruling upholding the government’s decision to oust the blind cleric as “a danger to the security of the United States.”

Brieant also supported an earlier ruling that Abdul Rahman did not qualify for political asylum in the United States, but the order delayed Abdul Rahman’s deportation for 10 days so that his lawyers could take the case to the U.S. Court of Appeals.

Rohit Turkhud, one of the sheik’s lawyers, said Monday that the 55-year-old cleric will have to decide whether he wants to appeal Brieant’s ruling. Abdul Rahman surrendered last month to federal authorities under his deportation order and has been held at the federal prison in Otisville, N.Y.

If the sheik decides against an appeal or if the appeal fails, the U.S. government would be expected to try to deport him to Saudi Arabia, which is the country he left to come to the United States.

If the Saudi government decides not to take him, the U.S. government can pick the country where he should go, Turkhud said. If Abdul Rahman were returned to Egypt, he would face an arrest order by an Egyptian court for allegedly participating in an anti-government riot in 1989.

“I suspect that the first country that the U.S. government will try, if the Saudi government says no, is Egypt,” said Turkhud. “And that is where politics comes into it.”

The sheik’s lawyers have argued that the government should release Abdul Rahman from federal detention and restore his status to that of April, 1991, when he was given permanent residence as a “minister of religion.”

An October, 1992, State Department opinion called the sheik an “uncompromising extremist who has incited his followers, mainly impressionable youths,” and even though it said he had not been on the scene during a violent event, “the evidence shows a clear pattern of encouraging others to commit violent acts against Christians in Egypt and against others.”

Some of the sheik’s followers are among the men now in federal prison awaiting trials in the bombing of the World Trade Center and in the alleged plot to blow up the United Nations, a federal building housing the FBI and the Holland and Lincoln tunnels here.

Reports of tapes of alleged plotters and one of the sheik himself appear to show conflicting evidence of whether he encouraged the bombing and the plot.

The sheik has denounced the trade center bombing and has said he was not involved or responsible in either matter.