FBI Seeks 2 Bombing Suspects : Death Toll at 52; U.S. Offers $2-Million Reward : Terrorism: Warrants are issued for unidentified white men. Officials give descriptions and say the pair has been linked to a rental truck used in the Oklahoma City blast.

The FBI asked the public Thursday to help it find two men wanted in the bombing of an Oklahoma City federal building, and the U.S. government offered a $2-million reward. Rescuers probed wreckage from the explosion for more survivors, and the death toll climbed to 52--with expectations that it would exceed 200.

Agents issued arrest warrants for two unidentified white men suspected of using aliases to rent a truck used to haul a half-ton, homemade bomb to the north side of the Alfred P. Murrah Building and blow it up. The death toll, including at least 12 children, makes this the deadliest bombing attack in U.S. history.

Weldon Kennedy, agent in charge of the FBI investigation, said at a news conference here that the federal warrants name two “John Does” because the FBI does not know the identity of either man. But Kennedy released composite sketches of the pair, and he described them this way:

--Medium build, 5-foot-10-inches or 5-foot-11-inches, 180 to 185 pounds, light brown crew cut, right-handed.

--Medium build, 5-foot-9-inches or 5-foot-10-inches, 175 to 180 pounds, brown hair, tattoo visible beneath T-shirt sleeve on left arm; possibly a smoker.

The reward was announced in Washington by Atty. Gen. Janet Reno, who asked at a nationally broadcast news conference that anyone with information about the bombers telephone the FBI. She said that the reward money was being contributed by a variety of federal agencies. Most of it, she said, would come from the Treasury Department.

Kennedy said that a third man, whom Reno described as a “possible witness,” was being returned from London. Britain’s Home Office said the man had landed at Heathrow Airport on a flight from Chicago and was being sent back to the United States. Neither the Home Office nor the U.S. Justice Department offered any additional information about him.

There were these additional developments:

* The death toll reached 52 when rescue workers removed additional bodies from the wreckage of the federal office building late in the day. The rescuers had suspended their search until the shattered columns of the building could be reinforced with concrete and steel. One doctor told reporters that the structure was a “cave filled with booby traps.”

* President Clinton, using ever harsher words about the bombers, portrayed their deed as a threat to national security. “Make no mistake about it,” he told a news conference in the White House Rose Garden. “This was an attack on the United States, our way of life and everything we believe in.” He further tightened security in federal buildings.

At his Oklahoma City news conference, Kennedy said the FBI considered its two suspects “armed and extremely dangerous” and cautioned that “citizens should not attempt to take any action against these men.” Instead, he said, they should provide information about the suspects to the nearest FBI office, or call 1-800-905-1514.

A federal law enforcement source in Washington said that authorities were able to obtain descriptions of the two men by tracing a truck axle found two blocks from the wreckage of the building to a Ryder rental office in Junction City, Kan.

Dave Russell, a Ryder official, identified the rental office to the Associated Press as Elliott’s Body Shop.

At the rental office, a source, who asked to remain anonymous, investigators were able to piece together descriptions of the two suspects. Kennedy said the truck was used to transport several thousand pounds of fertilizer and fuel oil to the north side of the building.

The deadly mixture was detonated at 9:04 a.m. Wednesday, when hundreds of office workers were at their desks and many of their children were in a second-floor day-care center.

Kennedy declined to describe the type of truck used to carry the explosives. But other investigators said that it would have to have been a large one--or a van. They said the amount of fertilizer and fuel oil capable of such an explosion could not have been transported undetected in an open-bed pickup truck.

Action in London

Kennedy said the man held in London and returned to the United States appeared to be carrying a U.S. passport.

He was stopped by U.S. Customs and immigration agents at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago. They had been asked by FBI agents to look for him as he debarked from an Oklahoma City flight that arrived in the early afternoon and before he boarded a 3:30 p.m. Alitalia flight to Rome.

The man, born in Jordan, was interviewed at the Office of Immigration at O’Hare and missed his Rome flight, but was eventually released, said Joseph Ladow, special agent in charge of the Customs Office of Investigations in Chicago.

He elected to leave on an 8 p.m. British Air flight to Heathrow Airport, Ladow said.

British authorities said they detained the man at Heathrow on information supplied by U.S. Customs. A Heathrow security source said the man was in his early to mid-20s, of Arab appearance, with jet black hair and mustache.

He was flown to Washington under escort, where he will be questioned by FBI agents. A federal law enforcement source said that he may be linked to three pieces of luggage that Italian authorities seized in Rome after they were flown in from Chicago.

One U.S. source said the luggage included possible bomb-making tools and materials. But Carl Stern, the Justice Department public affairs director, refused to confirm or deny it.

At her press conference, Reno was asked if the composite drawings of the two suspects linked to the rented vehicle made it fair to conclude the suspects were not of Arab origin.

“I don’t think that you should conclude anything until the evidence is in,” she said. “We are trying to pursue every lead. It is important that the people of this country not be confused by any conclusion that is not based on solid fact.”

A spokesman for the Immigration and Naturalization Service in Washington denied that the INS had made any arrests linked to the Oklahoma City bombing, knocking down widespread media reports that it was holding three suspects of Middle Eastern descent in Dallas and in Oklahoma.

The INS spokesman said flatly that the agency does “not have any individuals in custody pertaining to the Oklahoma City bombing case.”

The INS is deeply involved in the case, however. The agency has assigned a veteran of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, Dan Malerio, head of investigations for the INS New York district office, to the FBI group working on the Oklahoma City case.

In addition, the INS has assigned a team of agents to Oklahoma City, while INS port directors are working with airport officials around the nation to mount an intensive screening of airline passengers departing the United States.

The Search

Throughout the day, grim firefighters and K-9 teams filed in and out of the Murrah building, where they focused all of their efforts probing pockets or voids in the pancaked structure for anyone who might still be alive.

“Firefighters are having to crawl around some bodies still in the area,” said Assistant Fire Chief Jon Hansen. “The only time we’re taking out a body is if it’s in the way. We’ve got to focus on the possibility that there’s still people living in there.”

But the rescue crews, relying on high-tech audio sensors and fiber-optic cameras, did not pick up any signs of life.

On several occasions, the rescuers were ordered out of the rubble so that demolition crews could remove concrete and steel reinforcing rods that threatened to collapse on them. At one point, all rescue work was halted briefly so that builders could reinforce parts of the building with steel and concrete.

“Right now, it’s very, very slow,” Hansen said. “We have to be so careful.”

Pieces of rubble continued to fall, however, ricocheting through the structure every time a strong wind blew. An air-conditioning unit, hanging from its wire connections, swung precariously from the sheared face of the building, clanging against the cement.

The rescuers dug with shovels, lifted cement slabs with crowbars, smashed concrete with sledgehammers and sifted rubble with their gloved hands. They wore hard hats, kneepads, goggles and helmet lamps.

In dusty darkness inside the wreckage, they pressed masks firmly against their mouths and noses. “It was the smell of death, basically,” said Danny Hague, an 18-year veteran of the Fire Department.

Asked about the possibility of finding anyone alive, rescuers talked hopefully about stories of miraculous survival following earthquakes in San Francisco, Mexico City and the Philippines. But their optimism was tempered by the hard reality of body parts, splattered blood and children’s toys.

The rescuers were led through brief counseling sessions before entering the structure to prepare them for the horrors inside. When they came out, they went through more counseling sessions to talk about ways of dealing with what they encountered.

“It can sure mess a guy up seeing all that stuff,” said Steve Capps, a firefighter for 16 years. “What you see in there is not normal.” He focused most of his efforts on what was left of the day-care center.

He paled, he said, at the sight of only one item: a diaper.

“It really makes you want to go home and hug your kids,” Capps said. He is the father of two boys, ages 11 and 16.

For Fire Department Lt. Tommy Thompson, it was a baby’s white shoe.

He spotted it in the rubble of the basement, put it in a plastic evidence bag and had it taken out of the building. “It was a shoe, just a little kid’s shoe,” said Thompson, a fourth-generation firefighter. “It just brings back that there were kids--that there still are kids--in there.”

At one point, speculation swirled about a woman many rescue workers believed they had seen waving for help from a ledge on the eighth floor of the nine-story building. But after surveying the ledge with high-powered binoculars, Fire Chief Gary Marrs concluded that it was “a piece of furniture, not a human body.”

Steve Gullett, director of the Ozarkian Wilderness Institute--a Springfield, Mo., group that specializes in rescues from collapsed caves, spent all night at the building.

“I wanted to find a body that could talk to me, that could say, ‘Here I am, thank you.’ But I haven’t been that fortunate,” Gullett said. “I lay down on the grass a little while ago, just to appreciate being alive.”

He said his most emotional moment came when he stumbled upon a family portrait, splattered in blood and buried in the wreckage. Nearby, he found a purse that contained the identification papers of a woman who appeared to be the wife and mother in the portrait.

“I almost lost it,” Gullett said. “I almost had to leave.”

He said the search was slow and extremely tedious, a matter of moving one brick at a time so as not to trigger a chain reaction that might endanger the lives of the rescue workers.

One member of every rescue crew, he said, is assigned as its safety officer, whose sole responsibility it is to watch for any signs of impending structural collapse.

“It takes hours of digging just to go inches,” Gullett said. “There’s the possibility of a domino effect, and you don’t want to remove the wrong domino.”

Rick Nelson, 38, a surgeon, helped rescue a 15-year-old girl named Brandi late Wednesday night--the last known survivor to be pulled from the wreckage. On Thursday, she was listed in critical but stable condition.

Nelson recounted the drama, explaining how he held Brandi’s hand as other rescue workers dug for nearly three hours to extricate her.

“I said, ‘We’re going to get you out, honey,’ ” Nelson recalled. “I told her she had the best looking surgeon in Oklahoma.”

He had joined several other rescuers, assuming he was going to do nothing more than remove corpses from the building. But then they had heard Brandi’s cries for help and spotted her right leg protruding from a pile of twisted metal and concrete.

Gingerly, Nelson said, they removed piece after piece of the debris until they found her lying on her side, inside a pocket of rubble that had given her just enough room to breathe.

“It’s frustrating to think that there might be more Brandis out there,” Nelson said. “How much longer can they last?”

President Clinton

In his remarks, Clinton added a veiled warning to any foreign government that might be linked to the bombing.

While cautioning that there is no proof so far that foreign powers were implicated, he said that “whoever did it, we will find out, and there will be justice that will be swift and severe. And there is no place to hide.”

Clinton, who also ordered that flags be flown at half-staff, expressed satisfaction that the crime bill proposed by his Administration included provisions for capital punishment in bombing cases such as this.

“If this isn’t an appropriate case for it, I don’t think there would ever be one,” he declared. When Reno announced Wednesday that she would seek capital punishment for the bombers, Clinton said: “She did so with my knowledge and support.”

The President also urged Americans not to “jump to any conclusions” about the ethnic origins of the perpetrators. He noted that three Arab American groups had condemned the bombing.

But some experts said Clinton would face difficult decisions if the culprits are linked to Middle East terrorist groups.

Then “pressure would grow for action,” said Rep. Lee H. Hamilton (D-Ind.), the ranking minority member of the House International Affairs Committee. “I can’t imagine that we’d fail to retaliate if there were some clear connection between the bombing and some foreign government.”

If the links to a foreign government are clear, U.S. policy-makers could decide on military retaliation, as Clinton did in 1993 to punish Iraq for the attempted assassination of former President George Bush.

Such retaliation, usually bomb or missile attacks, “may not do very much,” said Helmut Sonnenfeldt, a national security expert at the Brookings Institution. “But they make a symbolic point.”

Meanwhile, increased security was evident at the 8,200 federal buildings throughout the nation, where about 1 million Americans work.

In Washington, officials moved temporary barriers into place along roadways and increased auto searches and traffic surveillance. It slowed springtime crowds of visitors clustering around the Capitol and the White House.

But aides said there had been no step-up in the pace of an eight-month-old review of White House security procedures.

The review was begun after a small plane crashed into the Executive Mansion last September. Officials said the study was awaiting decisions from Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin and might be released next month.

The Treasury Department is in charge of the Secret Service, which is responsible for White House security.

No decision has been made on a proposal to close Pennsylvania Avenue near the White house, the aides said.

Katz reported from Oklahoma City and Ostrow from Washington. Times staff writers James Risen and Paul Richter in Washington, Richard A. Serrano in Oklahoma City and J. Michael Kennedy and Richard E. Meyer in Los Angeles also contributed to this story.

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Searching for Survivors

Rescuers, working with architects, are now combing through the rubble of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City looking for pockets where survivors may still be trapped.

Penetrating the Rubble

Rescuers use a variety of listening devices and cameras to search for survivors.

Cameras and microphones: Monitor is carried in a front pack. Image is transmitted from hand-held Searchcam, long boom with camera and acoustic microphone on one end. Searchcam can be lowered into cracks and voids.

Directional microphones: Carried around by rescuers as they walk through the building, similar to ones that TV camera crews use.

Ground sensing radar: Acts as a sonar mapping tool, can pinpoint the locations of the voids in the rubble by sensing vibrations.

How Pockets Are Created

Voids in the rubble of a collapsed building are often created when a wall doesn’t collapse completely and creates a barrier to an isolated space.

Other equipment used: Hydraulic lifters-used to lift heavy beams or chunks of concrete to create openings for rescuers to use in extracting survivors from under the rubble.

Rescue dogs-used to locate bodies.

Rotary saw, used for wood and lightweight concrete.

Sources: L.A. City Search and Rescue; Clark Staten, Emergency Response & Research Institute