Snared in The Terrorist Web

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

LEGALLY, THREE DISTINCT TERRORIST crimes had been committed. But as investigators dug in, the same names kept popping up in all three. El Sayyid Nosair was jailed on gun-possession charges in connection with the 1990 murder of a prominent Zionist in New York City. He was repeatedly visited in an upstate prison by Muslim fundamentalists accused of last February's bombing of the World Trade Center. They had links to the ring charged with plotting to blow up the Holland and Lincoln tunnels, the United Nations building and a federal office skyscraper in early July. All looked for spiritual guidance to Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind Egyptian preacher of Islamic radicalism. Finally last week federal prosecutors declared that the three cases were part of a single terrorist conspiracy led by Abdel Rahman. A grand jury in New York City indicted Abdel Rahman, Nosair and 13 others on sweeping charges that they had plotted "to levy a war of urban terrorism against the United States."

Although that suspicion was not new, Attorney General Janet Reno had decided two months ago that there was not enough evidence against Sheik Abdel Rahman. When New York politicians angrily protested against letting him walk around free, the best Reno and U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White could think of was to arrest him on a charge of violating immigration laws. Federal authorities say no startling piece of new evidence or major new witness knitted their case together. Rather, they assert, good police work did it: the sifting and analysis of many bits of information gradually filled out a picture of far- reaching conspiracy.

As the indictment sketched out the case, the plotters allegedly intended to kidnap and/or murder supposed enemies of Islam much as they had gunned down Meir Kahane, the virulent leader of the rightist Kach organization. The targets named included a New York state assemblyman ally of Kahane's, the state judge who sentenced Nosair, and President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt. Two months ago, Siddig Ibrahim Siddig Ali boasted that the conspirators had recruited a pilot willing to bomb Mubarak's presidential palace in Cairo. In the U.S. future bombing targets allegedly included unspecified military installations as well as the George Washington Bridge and the heavily Jewish New York City diamond district.

On Thursday all 15 defendants were marched, handcuffed and in single file, into a courtroom in lower Manhattan, where they entered pleas of not guilty. The courtroom was packed with security men, since three Egyptian extremist organizations had vowed "revenge" if Abdel Rahman is harmed. Defense lawyers accused the government of conflating rumors and suspicions into a fantasy conspiracy to whip up a new kind of cold war hysteria, substituting Islamic fundamentalism for communism as the enemy.

Prosecutors will have to convince a jury that the bits of circumstantial evidence add up. Some consist of items seized from defendants' living quarters, notably a big haul from Nosair's apartment that languished unexamined after the Kahane slaying. It supposedly yielded "formulas for the construction of bombs," and video and audio tapes advocating the destruction of tall buildings.

Far more important, however, are tapes recording 150 hours of conversation between various defendants and Emad Salem, who was simultaneously Sheik Abdel Rahman's bodyguard and an FBI informer. Salem is not named in the indictment but is obviously the "person known to the grand jury" who is referred to time and again. He allegedly was recruited into the conspiracy in November 1991, and helped plot bombings.

The case may stand or fall on Salem's credibility to a trial jury. Defense Attorney William Kunstler accuses him of concocting the whole plot and entrapping the other defendants in it as a money-making venture -- there are reports that the FBI is paying him as much as $500,000.

Defense lawyers further insist that there is no evidence directly linking + some defendants, especially Abdel Rahman, to specific crimes. The Sheik's ferocious tirades against enemies of Islam, they say, cannot be equated with inciting followers to kill. Ron Kuby, lawyer for two defendants, poses a novel analogy: "Why wasn't the Pope taken into custody when he visited Denver? He is the spiritual leader of abortion-clinic bombers and doctor killers."

The government, however, is bringing its case under conspiracy and racketeering statutes similar to those used to convict members of the Mafia and drug rings. In a conspiracy case, prosecutors can present to a single jury a full picture of everything the conspirators allegedly did or planned, including evidence that might not be relevant to a specific crime. Jeh Johnson, a former federal prosecutor, notes that "if the government can prove a defendant was aware of the conspiracy and did something to become involved in it, he becomes as liable as the rest."

Under those rules, the government need not prove that Abdel Rahman directly ordered his followers to blow up any targets. It may be enough to show, as the indictment charges, that he "provided instruction regarding whether particular acts of terrorism were permissible or forbidden ((under Islamic law, presumably)), served as a mediator of disputes among members of the organization, and undertook to protect the organization from infiltration by law-enforcement authorities."

The racketeering statutes also offer the government a second crack at trying Nosair for the murder of Kahane without running afoul of the constitutional prohibition against double jeopardy. Many people, including the judge in the case, were outraged when a state jury convicted Nosair of gun possession but acquitted him of the murder itself. It is a well-established principle that the same act can be prosecuted twice if it violates the laws of different "sovereignties." And though murder as such is not a federal crime, killing someone to further a racketeering conspiracy, as Nosair is accused of doing, is.

Some legal experts think U.S. Attorney White may have drawn the conspiracy too broadly. If she cannot prove all that is alleged, they think, she may wind up with fewer convictions than she might have won in a series of narrowly defined cases. As to Abdel Rahman, the feds may have figured they had nothing to lose. They had no narrow case against him, and if he is acquitted of the larger charges, they can resume deportation proceedings and "kick his butt out of the country," as an official puts it.

But where could he be sent? Egypt has put in only a quarter-hearted request for extradition; Mubarak would vastly prefer to have Abdel Rahman in a U.S. prison than on trial in Egypt, fluttering terrorists' hearts. The sheik's lawyers have talked about having him go voluntarily to Afghanistan, but no one wants to see him free in that hotbed of Islamic fundamentalism. Mohammad Mehdi, head of an Arab-American organization, predicts that "the sheik is going to be our guest in America for many years." Fine by Washington, as long as his guesthouse has bars on the windows.

With reporting by Richard Behar/New York, Dean Fischer/Cairo and Elaine Shannon/Washington