N.Y. Police Act to Avert New Terrorist Attacks

Acting on tips, police mounted strict security checks Tuesday on Wall Street to try to avert a new outbreak of terrorist attacks as the World Trade Center bombing approaches its second anniversary.

Uniformed police officers were stationed for high visibility outside the New York and American stock exchanges, and sources said that the number of plainclothes police was markedly increased in the Wall Street area. Security also was heightened at such potential targets as Rockefeller Center, where plans are under way to ban street parking.

“Every single precaution is being taken,” Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani said.

In a related development, the Kuwaiti government linked Iraq and Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, who was arrested last week and charged with masterminding the trade center bombing.

Yousef, who was arrested in Pakistan last week, collaborated with the Iraqi invasion force during its six-month occupation of Kuwait, the Kuwaiti interior minister charged.

Yousef is described as a militant who carried out missions on behalf of Iraq in 1990 and 1991, although Kuwaiti officials in Kuwait City and Washington refused to specify the nature of his activities.

Anxieties about new terrorism were fed by the approaching anniversary of the Feb. 26, 1993, attack on the twin towers and by the arrest of Yousef. Informants reportedly told investigators that groups of Muslim extremists were planning new attacks, in part to protest the trial of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and 10 followers charged with plotting to bomb the United Nations, two tunnels linking New York and New Jersey, and the Manhattan field office of the FBI.

At the New York Stock Exchange, authorities carefully checked credentials and searched items carried by workers. Police barricades were set up to stop vehicles from parking, and officers checked delivery trucks.

A police memo warned businesses to pay particular attention to parking garages, public restrooms and underground facilities. The massive bomb that exploded at the trade center was carried into the garage in a rented van.

Also on Tuesday, there was angry reaction over a list of 172 unindicted people who government lawyers said may be alleged later to be co-conspirators in the plot linked to Abdel Rahman.

The list, disclosed this week, contains friends and associates of Abdel Rahman, including officials of mosques where he preached; associates of the four defendants convicted in the trade center attack, and Dr. Mohammed Mehdi, head of the National Council on Islamic Affairs. In a letter to defense lawyers, prosecutors said that the list was not exhaustive and that the investigation was continuing.

Mehdi said in an interview that he had merely advised the blind Egyptian cleric of his right under the First Amendment to free speech. He said that he had written to the U.S. Attorney’s Office demanding an apology for his inclusion on the list.

The U.S. government “is applying the rule of guilt by association,” Mehdi charged. “If the government has anything against me, they should take me to a court of law.

“It’s just pouring dirt. Our children, Muslim children, are afraid to identify themselves as Muslims,” he said. “They are afraid people will say: ‘You are a Muslim terrorist, Muslim fundamentalist, a conspirator.’ It is a very unwholesome development.”

The list also included the Sudanese Mission to the United Nations. Last week, Siddig Ibrahim Siddig Ali, a co-defendant in the alleged plot, decided to cooperate with prosecutors.

In his guilty plea, Siddig Ali, a Sudanese national who acted as the sheik’s bodyguard and later as his translator, told the court that he had received help from representatives of an unnamed foreign government for access to and surveillance of the U.N. garage and the use of diplomatic license plates.

The allegations of a link between Yousef and Iraq fall short of implicating Iraq in the twin tower bombing. “There’s been some interesting circumstantial evidence of a possible Iraqi role in the trade center bombing, but we still don’t have a smoking gun,” said a knowledgeable U.S. official.

“There’s no hard evidence linking Yousef and Iraq,” said another source. “It’s entirely circumstantial, on the basis of which you can’t rule it out or in.”

The four Muslim extremists already convicted are not believed to have knowingly had state sponsorship, according to law enforcement officials. But American terrorist experts contended that Yousef, the alleged mastermind and supplier of funds and technical expertise, is unlikely to have managed to carry out his operations worldwide without outside help.

One U.S. source close to the investigation said that, during questioning by federal investigators, Yousef implicated Iraq as a sponsor of the 1993 bombing. Ranking Administration officials, however, have denied at least twice that such a link has been established or that Yousef is cooperating with investigators.

Yousef may have been given his current and previous identities by Iraq, according to Laurie Mylroie, an Iraq expert who has briefed White House, State Department and congressional officials.

Yousef arrived in the United States in 1992 on an Iraqi passport. He left six months later carrying a Pakistani passport under the name Abdul Basit on Feb. 26, 1993, the day of the bombing.

According to Mylroie, Basit was the son of a middle-class Pakistani family who had lived in Kuwait and is believed to be dead. Basit’s father worked for Kuwait Airways. After going to school briefly in Britain, he returned to Kuwait and worked for the Planning Ministry.

During the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait, Mylroie said, the Iraqis gave Yousef the identity papers for Basit. “Among other things, the Iraqis saw the invasion as an opportunity to create identities for its agents,” Mylroie said.

The Iraqis even doctored the Kuwaiti file on Basit, adding Yousef’s fingerprints and explanations that the family had returned to Pakistan.

But the family instead may have disappeared, Mylroie contends. She believes that members of the family died during the occupation, opening the way for Yousef to assume Basit’s identity without danger of being caught.

Times staff writer Ronald J. Ostrow in Washington contributed to this story.