SUBWAY SCARE: TERROR TAKES AIM AT NEW YORK

By Michael S. Serrill

About 11 p.m. on Wednesday, a frantic man flagged down a police car in Brooklyn, N.Y. Something terrible was about to happen, he tried to tell the cops, using broken English and sign language. At one point he flung his arms apart to indicate an explosion. When a translator arrived at the local precinct house, the man reported a plot by men he was living with to set off an explosion in New York City's subways that could have matched in carnage the blast that had just devastated Jerusalem's busiest market.

New York police and federal officers moved into action. They surrounded a rundown building at 248 Fourth Ave., just outside the middle-class Park Slope neighborhood, quietly evacuated 90 nearby residents and rerouted subway trains that carry 300,000 passengers every rush hour. Just before dawn, heavily armed cops swarmed into a first-floor apartment. One of the men inside reached into a bag, while another lunged for one of the officers' guns. Both men were shot repeatedly. The bag turned out to contain a powerful pipe bomb, one of several in the apartment. The suspect had succeeded in flicking one of four toggle switches needed to detonate it.

The two wounded men--recovering at a local hospital--were identified as Gazi Ibrahim Abu Mezer, 23, and Lafi Khalil, 22, both Palestinians carrying Jordanian passports. Did the two have links to the militant Islamic movement? Amid the squalor of their apartment were reportedly a picture of the blind Egyptian cleric convicted of conspiring to blow up New York City landmarks, and a note threatening violence against U.S. and Jewish targets. Khalil was carrying an address book listing the name of a known terrorist. Also found: Abu Mezer's completed application for political asylum in the U.S. on the ground that Israel had falsely accused him of belonging to the fundamentalist group Hamas.

Abu Mezer is from Hebron, a Hamas stronghold on the West Bank, and was detained several days for rock throwing during the intifadeh. Arrested at the Canadian border in January as he tried to enter the U.S. illegally, he was detained until Feb. 6, when he posted a $5,000 bond. Some reports said Abu Mezer's alleged bombmaking was sped by news of the Hamas attack in Jerusalem. On Saturday, though, Hamas released a statement denying involvement in the Brooklyn plot. It declared, "Our battlefield is Palestine."

--By Michael S. Serrill. Reported by William Dowell/New York and Elaine Shannon/Washington

With reporting by WILLIAM DOWELL/NEW YORK AND ELAINE SHANNON/WASHINGTON