Technology Lets Tentacles of Terrorism Extend Reach : Alliances: Cellular phones and the Internet help militants connect. Even charities are suspected as fronts.

The used Datsun pickup truck was purchased for $13,700 from its unsuspecting owner in the border town of Peshawar and packed with a huge quantity of explosives--the equivalent of 500 pounds of TNT.

On a Sunday morning in November, a normal working day in this overwhelmingly Muslim country, the vehicle was piloted by a suicide driver through the gate of the Egyptian Embassy in Islamabad and detonated with devastating effect.

The concussion stripped the bark from trees across the street. The facade of the two-story mission, decorated with white castle-like turrets, was sheared off. A crater 12 feet deep was gouged in the earth.

In the courtyard and under the ruins of the embassy, 16 people lay dead, and more than 50 wounded were screaming in agony.

It has been nine months since the deadliest terrorist attack ever committed in Pakistan’s capital. Police detectives, still searching for missing links in the chain of evidence, have directed their attention to an Egyptian-born citizen of Canada who works for an Ontario-based charity founded to “alleviate human suffering.”

The suspect, Ahmed Saied Khadr, 48, a regional director for the group, was taken into custody and later released. He insists that he is innocent, and officers of the Federal Investigation Agency acknowledge that the gathering of clues is not over.

But the suspicions of authorities in Islamabad are understandable. They, and colleagues in other countries, have seen similar cases before.

“Terrorism can operate under many guises and particular covers,” Farouk Rana, Pakistan’s high commissioner in Ottawa, has noted.

Different Agendas

As countries across the Muslim world mobilized resources in the 1980s to help their beleaguered brethren in Afghanistan, scores of nongovernmental organizations such as Khadr’s Human Concern International swung into action to provide assistance to the country’s 5 million refugees and up to 3 million internally displaced people; support the war against the Soviet invaders; and funnel foreign combatants into the theater.

Most of the Muslim charities were involved in bona fide humanitarian relief work.

But some had different, or additional, agendas.

The experience had as its side effect one of the most durable, troublesome legacies of the war in Afghanistan. “We now see people meeting who shouldn’t be,” one high-ranking French law enforcement official said.

For Muslim radicals from many lands, the Afghan War was a formative experience--both for perfecting an organizational skeleton, which in some cases was used to recruit, arm and deploy fighters or militants for the Afghan War, and for coordination of activities with like-minded people from other countries.

As late as the 1970s, experts say, extremist groups in the Muslim world were separate--the Muslim Brotherhood in one country, Islamic Jihad in another. They often grew up around common neighborhoods and were, in a sense, like street gangs, unchallenged on their turf.

Now they are no longer totally disparate forces.

More than a decade and a half of interaction in Afghanistan and in Peshawar, the frontier town that served as a base for most of the foreign Muslim organizations involved in support of the Afghans, has resulted in a loose network of people who now either know or know of each other, have fought for the same thing--and it is true, sometimes against one another--and may have married into each other’s families.

“Fundamentalism has globalized. It is as global as the 6th Fleet,” said Saad Ibrahim, chairman of the Ibn Khaldoun Center for Development Studies, a private think tank in Cairo.

That doesn’t mean there is now such a thing as “Jihad International.”

“There is no Islamic Comintern,” said a French diplomat who monitors Islamic militancy, referring to the Moscow-based Communist group founded in 1919 to spread proletarian revolution throughout the world. “This business is more like the Internet--a series of loose connections. If one connection is cut, a message can easily pass via another channel.”

In large part because of the comradeship forged during the Afghan War, a U.S. official in Washington said, militants from different countries now “use common transit points and are comfortable with one another and not in separate fortresses of Islamic resistance.”

Using modern technology, keeping in touch is easier than ever. Algeria’s Armed Islamic Group has a page on the Internet, Western diplomats in Algiers report. In France, the Islamic extremists who masterminded last year’s series of terrorist bombings kept in contact via cellular phones.

“In terms of global leadership, they use the media, faxes, the Internet,” Ibrahim of the Ibn Khaldoun Center said.

As one example of cross-national contacts that can be directly traced to the shared Afghan experience, Islamic organizations in the northern Italian city of Milan served as contact points between the followers of Egyptian cleric Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and Algeria’s fundamentalist rebels, according to French authorities. Abdel Rahman was sentenced to life in prison in the United States in January as the alleged spiritual leader of terrorist plots in New York.

A key moment in the new era of radical Islamic fraternity launched in Afghanistan came in June last year, when, on the banks of the Nile, Sudanese officials played host to an “Arab and Islamic Peoples’ Conference” to try to coordinate the next steps in a global Islamic revolution.

A total of 300 Muslim revolutionaries, including Palestinians and activists from countries such as Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Lebanon, Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan attended the Khartoum meeting.

Sudan has been on the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism since 1993 as an alleged “refuge, nexus and training hub” for international terrorist organizations.

Arab Funding Sources

Private funding sources in the Arab world, especially in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, helped get fighters to Afghanistan and pay for their training and support once they were there. U.S. officials said they tried several times during the Afghan War to get the governments in Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf region to regulate those sources but failed.

Osama ibn Laden, 44, an exiled Saudi billionaire, was the most celebrated private paymaster for the Afghan moujahedeen and is now accused of training Islamic fighters to topple the governments of Egypt, Algeria and his home country. Ibn Laden was also described as being “at the top of the list” as U.S. investigators began searching for suspects in the June 25 bombing that killed 19 U.S. airmen at a military housing complex in Dhahran in eastern Saudi Arabia.

Now back in Afghanistan after being expelled from Sudan, Ibn Laden told a British reporter who found him in a remote mountain village in Nangarhar province that he had nothing to do with the Dhahran attack. But he noted that “the bombers hit their main target, which is the Americans.”

Investigators in Pakistan believe that Ibn Laden, whose wealth comes from a family construction business, also financed the globe-girdling activities of Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, 28, the alleged mastermind of the World Trade Center bombing in 1993.

No one, it would seem, took better advantage than Yousef of the ‘transnational” network of radical Islamists fostered by the Afghan conflict.

In Peshawar, his uncle Zahid Shaikh worked for a Kuwaiti-based Afghan relief organization, Mercy International. In Karachi, Pakistan, Yousef is known to have had links to an armed extremist group of Sunni Muslims, Sipah-e-Sahaba. In the Philippines, he reportedly was involved in training activities with the extremist Muslim Abu Sayyaf Organization.

Yousef is now on trial in New York for an alleged plot to bomb about a dozen U.S. jumbo jets over Asia and the Pacific. Another Muslim radical who trained and fought in Afghanistan, Egyptian-born Mahmud Abouhalima, was convicted in March 1994 for acting as the “hands-on ring leader” of the attack against the World Trade Center that Yousef allegedly planned.

When foreign Muslim fighters began to trickle into Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1992, many of the organizations that had been active in the Afghan struggle, or their successors, accompanied them.

The groups included a London-based charity, Human Relief International, staffed by young Egyptian men, and the Iranian Red Crescent society.

As in Afghanistan, most engaged in bona fide relief and development work.

But, experts note, a group that assisted war orphans or rebuilt schools could also serve as cover for someone involved in recruiting, funding and arming fighters, or itself provide weapons, money or employment to the moujahedeen.

“The NGOs [nongovernmental organizations] are like a travel agency for these guys,” said a source close to the moujahedeen in the neighboring country of Croatia. “If you want to go to Bosnia, you contact them. These organizations were also the channels that were used to get arms into Bosnia.”

Last December, when five armed men from Egypt, Libya, Algeria and Tunisia were shot and killed by Bosnian Croat police outside Zepce, police traced the victims’ four-wheel-drive vehicle to a German-registered charity, People Helping People. The group denied any connection with the Muslim fighters.

After the Nov. 19 suicide attack against the Egyptian Embassy in Pakistan, investigators’ suspicions rapidly fell on Muslim extremists from Egypt who live in Pakistan and on their sources of funding and support.

The truck’s smashed engine block, hurled by the blast onto the debris of the mission, gave police the vehicle’s engine and chassis numbers. From those, they traced the dealership that sold the truck, found the original buyer and got a description of the man, said to be an Arab, who purchased it second-hand.

Detained in Peshawar

On Dec. 3, Khadr, whose nonprofit charity is based in the Ottawa suburb of Gloucester, Ontario, was detained in Peshawar, one day after he crossed back into Pakistan from Afghanistan.

“We have strong suspicions that Khadr was supplying financial assistance to Egyptian militants,” a high-ranking Pakistani law enforcement official said.

During a visit to Cairo, Pakistani Foreign Minister Sardar Assef Ahmed Ali said the Canadian was suspected of bankrolling “this horrible crime.”

Khadr vigorously protested that the Pakistanis had gotten the wrong man.

“I’m a law-abiding person,” he said in a recent telephone interview. ‘It looks like I was living in a fool’s dream. I shouldn’t have come back. I should have gone out through Afghanistan to Canada.”

According to Pakistani investigators, the gray-bearded and soft-spoken man, who has a master’s degree in computer science from the University of Ottawa, received military training during the Afghan War, fought and was wounded. Ten Egyptian militants recently extradited to their homeland from Pakistan identified him as the source of funds for various terrorist activities directed against the Egyptian government, the investigators said.

They also found that Khadr was running a carpet-weaving business on the side, the proceeds of which may have further underwritten the radicals’ activities.

Khadr, who must walk with a four-pointed cane or use a wheelchair to cover anything but short distances, said the Pakistanis have got it wrong.

He said he suffered his injuries four years ago when a mine exploded as he was working on a project to repair war-damaged irrigation canals in Logar province, south of Kabul.

Pakistani investigators say they found a photo of him behind an antiaircraft gun. But he said that the snapshot was taken as a souvenir and that he never fought in Afghanistan.

Khadr was arrested after he went to police to complain of officers ransacking his house in Peshawar while he had been on a three-week visit to Afghanistan. He said they took $10,000 of his own money that he kept in his home, plus $29,000 he had carried to Afghanistan but brought back.

According to Khadr, the second sum was to pay for materials and salaries on a road construction project sponsored by Human Concern International.

He said he was dissatisfied with the work and carried the money back to Pakistan.

An additional reason the Pakistanis suspect Khadr is that he wanted his elder daughter, Zainab, 16, to marry a merchant whom they believe to be a member of the Al Jihad Egyptian extremist faction. That group issued one of three claims for the embassy bombing. The merchant, identified as Khalid Abdullah, 28, is suspected of involvement in the financial transactions leading to the purchase of the truck in the blast.

Since Khadr’s arrest, the wedding plans have been called off, his wife, Maha Elsamnah, and their six children, ages 4 to 16, have moved back to Ottawa, and Khalid Abdullah has disappeared.

Khadr said he is the victim of prejudice against Egyptians.

“I told them, my only crime is that I was born in Egypt,” he said.

The Cairo native, who has worked off and on in Peshawar for Human Concern International since 1985, said he takes no interest in the politics of his native country and has only one goal in Peshawar: to help victims of the Afghan War.

The charity that employs Khadr was established in 1980 in response to the tremendous suffering caused by the Afghan War and now has regional offices in Lebanon and Pakistan. It runs an orphanage for Afghan refugees, programs for widows and projects to revive Afghanistan’s agriculture and infrastructure.

“We don’t think the group is involved,” a Pakistani investigator said. He added that Khadr is suspected of exploiting his position with Human Concern to wage a personal struggle against the government of his native country.

But Canadian officials seem less sure about Khadr’s employer.

Payments to Group Halted

Since 1988, the Canadian government, through its International Development Agency, has contributed a total of $257,250 to Human Concern International to fund 19 projects. The only payment still outstanding, for completion of a project in Bangladesh, has been frozen, pending completion of Khadr’s trial.

The relief group has also been informed by Canadian officials that its request for government money to fund two more development projects in Lebanon is now on hold until a verdict in the Khadr case.

“I have lost my credibility in the community,” Khadr complained.

During interrogation, he said, he was blindfolded and his hair, beard and ears were pulled. To protest his confinement, he stopped eating solid food, lost 25 pounds and was shifted from the central jail in Rawalpindi to a hospital in Islamabad.

The case of the detained charity official received splashy, mostly sympathetic coverage in the Canadian press, in large part because of his hunger strike and because he had been jailed without being formally charged.

During a January visit to Islamabad, Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien personally brought up Khadr’s case with Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.

On March 31, the suspect was quietly released. One high-ranking Pakistani police official grumbled about “aggressive courts” and said they were influenced by Khadr’s fast and his injuries.

In his telephone interview from Peshawar, Khadr flatly denied being mixed up in terrorism or anything illegal.

Pakistani police, he said, “made a big fuss about something that didn’t exist. Does it make any sense that someone who was guilty of such a massive crime would come back [from Afghanistan]?”

Though Pakistani investigators acknowledge that their investigation is not complete, they say results so far speak for themselves. “Since we have busted this gang [the Egyptians], including him, these activities have gone down. I mean way down,” one high-ranking law enforcement official in Islamabad said.

Times staff writers David Lamb in Cairo, Robin Wright and Robert L. Jackson in Washington and Craig Turner in Toronto contributed to this report.

* Wednesday: For Islamic ideologues, the Afghan War yielded experience in the arts of war and propaganda and a vivid illustration of their violent credo.

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One Man’s Web of Terror?

At 28 years of age, Kuwaiti-born Ramzi Ahmed Yousef is believed by authorities to be responsible for terrorism efforts on an international scale. He is now on trial in New York on charges of plotting to bomb U.S. airliners.

Yousef’s travels and terrorism as alleged by investigators and press reports:

1968: Kuwait. Born, apparently to Pakistani parents.

1985-86: Peshawar, Pakistan. Some accounts have him training and fighting with Afghan resistance guerrillas.

1989: Swansea, Wales. Earns degree in electronic engineering.

August 1990: Kuwait. Conflicting reports have him collaborating with Iraqi invasion force or fleeing war with other refugees.

December 1991: Southern Philippines. Arrives to train radical Muslim guerrillas for three months.

Sept. 1, 1992: New York. Arrives with Iraqi passport and applies for political asylum.

Feb. 6, 1993: Flies from New York to Karachi, Pakistan. World Trade Center bombing on same day kills 6, injures 1,000.

September 1993: Karachi, Pakistan. Allegedly injured while making bomb intended to kill Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.

Dec. 11, 1994: Manila. Allegedly plants bomb aboard Philippine Airlines flight to Tokyo. One killed.*

January 1995: Leaves Manila for Bangkok, Thailand, after police raid his apartment and find documents plotting to kill visiting Pope John Paul II.

Early February 1995: Bangkok. Allegedly involved in aborted plot to bomb U.S. airliner.

Feb. 7, 1995: Islamabad, Pakistan. Arrested at guest house and extradited to U.S. Suspect in World Trade Center bombing and failed plot to blow up about a dozen U.S. airliners.

* Note: Yousef says he was secretly imprisoned in Pakistan at this time.

Sources: Times staff and wire reports.

Compiled by JANE ENGLE.