Laying Hands on an Unwanted Guest

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

The first sheik was a fake. A figure clad in white robes and a red-and-white cap left the Abu Bakr Mosque in Brooklyn, New York, on Thursday night and got into a waiting van. Federal agents with guns drawn quickly surrounded the vehicle, crying, "Get out!" The man did, looked up -- and the feds immediately saw he was not Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman.

The second sheik was the real thing. A figure dressed the same way left the mosque a little after 6 p.m. on Friday. Surrounded by his supporters and under the eyes of federal agents and New York City cops, he walked between police barricades and past a crowd of onlookers, some chanting "Go to hell!" Getting him to come out required 20 hours of painstaking negotiations, partly about where he would go. Abdel Rahman wanted to be driven in his own car to New Jersey, to turn himself in at the Newark offices of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. The feds wanted him to surrender at INS headquarters in Manhattan. They compromised on a firehouse across the street from the mosque, where the sheik entered an INS van and was driven to a federal facility in Otisville, New York, about 75 miles northwest of New York City. The blind Egyptian cleric could be held until the resolution of his appeal of a deportation order issued by an immigration judge in March.

Abdel Rahman has been spiritual mentor to members of not one but two rings of suspected terrorists. The first group allegedly bombed the World Trade Center on Feb. 26. The second is accused of planning to bomb the United Nations building, a federal office building and the Holland and Lincoln tunnels; some of its members were arrested in the act of mixing the explosives. Officially, though, the sheik's detention had nothing to do with terrorism. Attorney General Janet Reno determined that there was insufficient evidence linking Abdel Rahman to the bomb plots, and she clung to that stand despite reports that the FBI had taped the sheik saying "American blood must be spilled on its own soil." (That, said one of the sheik's allies, was just "Arabic hyperbole -- good Arabic, bad English.")

But the March deportation order empowered the INS to detain the sheik, who had been on parole ever since. One reason for revoking parole is suspicion that the suspect might flee. Abdel Rahman obligingly provided grounds for such suspicion by leaving his apartment in Jersey City Wednesday night and leading federal agents who had been watching him on a car chase before holing up in the Brooklyn mosque.

In Egypt, where a judge last week issued a warrant for the sheik's arrest, Abdel Rahman's supporters vowed a global bomb campaign to avenge his U.S. detention. Which did little to reassure New Yorkers about their safety. On Thursday bomb scares closed the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel and one entrance to Kennedy Airport. A ninth suspect in the case of the would-be U.N. bombers was arrested, but some other plotters may be still at large. Meanwhile, at bail hearings for some of the original eight suspects, FBI officials charged that their targets also included the George Washington Bridge and the diamond district, a single block in Manhattan where gems are cut and polished, mostly by Jews. On an FBI tape, one terrorist excitedly envisioned the results: "Boom -- broken windows, Jews in the streets."

With reporting by Sharon E. Epperson and Janice C. Simpson/New York and Elaine Shannon/Washington