So Glad to See You

By DAVID VAN BIEMA

In a gray row of company housing on a dusty back street of the town of Kafr el Dawar in the Nile delta, a man answers the door, yet again. He wears a striped galabia and a look of exhaustion. "I am sorry," he says, "but I cannot talk. I am the father of Mahmud, but I don't know anything about him." Outside the house, a teenage boy says he is Mahmud's brother. Mahmud is not here. He left 14 years ago and never came back.

There is some doubt as to whether the brother is speaking the truth. Mahmud Abohalima, according to his lawyer, did indeed return to his parents' house on March 13. But before he had spent a day there, he was captured, spirited away and last week handed over to American authorities as the latest and most impressive trophy in the uncannily successful hunt for the perpetrators of the Feb. 26 bombing of the World Trade Center.

Last Thursday authorities paraded five of their six prime suspects -- Abohalima, Bilal Alkaisi, Mohammed Salameh, Nidal Ayyad and Ibrahim Elgabrowny -- into the U.S. District Court building in Manhattan's Foley Square. All five pleaded not guilty to charges related to the bombing. Ayyad, a chemical engineer, said, "I swear on the Koran, my wife, my children and my family and all I hold dear to me that I am not guilty and had nothing to do with this." The denials of the defendants notwithstanding, FBI and police investigators felt they had apprehended the core members of the terrorist conspiracy. Wider conspiracy theories about sponsors and trainers in Iran or Iraq began to fade away. Said James Esposito, head of the FBI's Newark, New Jersey, office: "The circle is now very narrow."

The puzzle had seemed less complete just a few days earlier, a condition best symbolized by the figure of Abohalima himself, or rather by his absence. The investigation had already yielded three imprisoned suspects, a cache of bomb-making chemicals, and the beginnings of a money trail. But it had not produced a ringleader; someone not quite "the John Gotti of this group," as a New York sleuth told New York Newsday, but the "guy ((who)) runs the crew."

Abohalima seemed to fit that profile. Having come to the United States via Germany and attained permanent alien status as a "farmworker" under a 1986 immigration law, the 6-ft. 4-in., 240-lb. redhead had in reality toiled as a cabbie -- a crooked one, his former boss suggested. He journeyed to Afghanistan in the late '80s to fight as a member of the Islamic, antigovernment mujahedin. More to the point, he was close to Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the fiery blind Muslim preacher whose fundamentalist sermons may have inspired the alleged bombers. Abohalima acted as the sheik's driver and did chores around the clergyman's house. When a rival of the sheik's in the Brooklyn, New York, fundamentalist community was stabbed and shot to death, Abohalima was considered a prime suspect. One federal official said of him and the bombing, "He has the expertise."

And an airline ticket. Shortly before Mohammed Salameh, the renter of the fatal Ryder van, was arrested, Abohalima literally took flight. Some thought to South Africa; others to Pakistan. One official merely lamented, "He's been lost track of. God knows where he is now."

God and the Egyptian government, it seemed. According to his lawyer, Jesse Berman, Abohalima made pilgrimage to Mecca and then Medina, Saudi Arabia, before being picked up by Egyptian police at the house in Kafr el Dawar at 2:30 one morning. They hustled him to parts unknown and, over 10 days, "strung him up like a shish kebab" for torture, beating him, burning him with cigarettes and forcing him to call his family and beg them to pretend never to have seen him, his lawyer said. (They apparently feared publicity would make whatever they would do with him next more complicated.) The Cairo government denies all this. A family member, however, had already disclosed the news of Abohalima's capture to his brother Mohammed, who lived with him in New Jersey. And Mohammed let the information slip to the FBI during a five- hour interrogation.

Then came a round of intense and delicate U.S.-Egyptian negotiations. The Egyptians admitted to having Abohalima, but they wanted to avoid the publicity of a formal extradition process. What emerged, as described by a White House official, seems rather improvised: "We had an arrest warrant for him. We told them that. They thought about it, and they turned him over to us."

On Tuesday three FBI agents and a New York City police detective left Kennedy airport on a chartered plane. They arrived in Cairo at midnight. Two hours later, they took off again, with Abohalima on board. At Stewart airport in upstate New York, they were met by guards with machine guns and a 12-car motorcade that whisked the suspect to a Manhattan jail a dozen blocks from the towers he was accused of trying to blow up.

Meanwhile, the American side of the investigation had progressed with the eerie ease that had marked it from the start. In the New Jersey apartment of suspect Nidal Ayyad, police discovered a timing device commonly used for terrorist bombs. They also announced that Salameh had been seen lugging tanks of compressed hydrogen, an explosion enhancer, which would help explain the destructive power of the blast. And finally, on Thursday, Bilal Alkaisi, identified by police as another "doer" in the bombing, turned himself in at the FBI's Newark, New Jersey, office. Investigators later asserted that he was providing yet fresher leads.

By the time Abohalima, sporting a large bruise on his forehead, was arraigned in the district court, a sense of satisfaction prevailed. Police, although they said there was still one suspect at large, talked about having captured most of the "doers" in the bombing. U.S. Attorney Roger Hayes allowed himself some congratulatory bombast. "No people, no nation can allow such acts to go unchallenged," he said. "For every cowardly act of violence struck at our liberty we will respond. Today, pursuant to our system of justice, we have done just that!"

The confidence of law enforcement officials was no doubt bolstered by a piece of evidence that gave the first clear indication of the bombers' motive. In a letter mailed to the New York Times around the time of the blast, a group calling itself the Liberation Army Fifth Battalion claimed responsibility and attributed the attack to anger with U.S. support for Israel. Authorities had verified that the letter was written by one of the suspects in custody, the newspaper said. The letter threatened additional attacks against civilian, military and "nuclear targets," unless the U.S. severed relations with Israel and ended interference in the internal affairs of Middle Eastern countries.

If the circle is indeed closed -- if six men armed with nothing much more than credit cards and fervent belief can cause hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of damage in America's largest city -- it may be the worst news of all, an inducement to further mayhem. Not long ago, when state-sponsored terrorism was the reigning speculation, Harry Brandon, Deputy Assistant Director of the FBI, said, "I don't think the World Trade Center is the beginning of a new wave of terrorism. But it remains a relatively cost- effective way to advance national policy in a violent way." So cost- effective, it seems, that you don't even have to be a nation to use it.

With reporting by Edward Barnes/New York, Amany Radwan/Kafr el Dawar and Elaine Shannon/Washington