Arab Fugitive May Have Planned Israeli Blast : Terrorism: Bus explosion resembled others blamed on ‘the Engineer.’ Now the PLO has joined the hunt for him.

He is an Orthodox Jew in a black skullcap. A Muslim woman in modest dress. Or a settler, speeding through Arab towns in a stolen Israeli car.

Yehiya Ayash, 30, is Israel’s most wanted Arab terrorist, an explosives expert and master of disguise, believed responsible for a series of recent suicide bombings that have killed dozens of Israelis.

Police are investigating whether he was behind Monday’s bus bombing in Ramat Gan that has now claimed six Israeli lives and that wounded 31. A caller to Israeli radio blamed the incident, in which the suspected suicide bomber was killed, on “the Engineer,” Ayash’s nom de guerre.

“There is a supposition that he may be associated with it,” police spokesman Eric Bar-Chen said Wednesday. “Once we find out who the bomber is, maybe we’ll know who sent him.”

Ayash is a member of the Islamic fundamentalist organization Hamas, which opposes the 1993 Israeli-Palestinian peace accord and hopes the recent attacks will erode Jewish support for the accord so that it fails. He is hunted not only by the Israelis now but by Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian police.

They have come close, yet the chameleon always disappears.

His ability to evade Israel’s famed security services for two years--plus several nearly successful attempts on his life--is turning Ayash into a mythic figure among admiring fundamentalists and Palestinians who support his cause. In the poor, northern West Bank village of Rafat, where Ayash was raised, he is a local boy who made good.

“He’s a hero,” said Shadi Ismail, 13, on Wednesday. “He’s smart, and the Israelis haven’t caught him. God is with him.”

A knot of boys nodded in agreement. They were unconvinced that Ayash killed people as the Israelis insist but were not all that concerned if he did.

“No one hates the son of his village,” Abdel Majid, 12, said with a shrug.

The village is a craggy hamlet of 1,200 people from seven extended families. It has a stone mosque perched on a hillside of fruit-laden cactus. It has no paved roads and no electricity, part of what residents call their “collective punishment” for being the Engineer’s hometown.

Neighbors and school chums say Ayash was a pious, humble youth who never got into fights or spoke badly of others. Except Israelis. The eldest of three sons resented that his father worked as a day laborer for Jews, said his mother, Aisha.

Ayash was sent to Bir Zeit University in the West Bank to better his life and his family’s lot. Instead, he became politicized and apparently turned to assassinations in the war against Zionism.

“I don’t like it that my son kills people. It was very hard putting him through university. We had a lot of hopes after graduation that he would get a good job in engineering,” his mother said. “Every time there’s an explosion, they say it’s our son. We don’t know where he is. He’s been on the run for two years and three months. There’s nothing in our hands to do.”

As the 50-year-old woman spoke, young boys filled her patio, fascinated by stories of the killer neighbor whom many view as a modern-day Saladin, the Muslim who crushed the Crusaders.

It is the Israelis who would like to crush Ayash, and, according to press reports, they almost did in April. Ayash reportedly left a Gaza City apartment building just half an hour before it blew up, killing his deputy, Kamal Kheil, among others. At the time, the government and Palestinian police said the explosion occurred in a Hamas bomb factory, but many Palestinians believe it was an operation by the Israeli intelligence service, the Mossad.

Earlier, in the Nablus area, Ayash also reportedly left another house minutes before Israeli commandos surrounded it and blew it up with antitank missiles.

On Wednesday, Israeli soldiers staffed their usual checkpoint at the edge of Rafat, checking identification papers and watching the Engineer’s house. They know that Ayash’s wife disappeared in recent weeks, taking their 2 1/2-year-old son.

Israeli officials say they saw the Engineer’s handiwork in the 1994 bus explosions at Afula, Hadera and in Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Street that killed 35 people, and in the January suicide bombing at the Beit Lid bus stop near Netanya that killed 21 Israelis, most of them soldiers. He also is blamed for many roadside bombs that have killed soldiers.

Ayash is a technician, not a leader or decision-maker. Israeli explosives experts consider him to be a resourceful killer. At Hadera in April, 1994, they say, Ayash supplied the suicide bomber with a second explosive intended to detonate when rescue teams arrived. It was disarmed.