Center Bombing

WASHINGTON -- In a closely held operation, the FBI brought JTC back from Jordan yesterday a heretofore unknown suspect in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, government sources disclosed.Eyad Ismail Najim, a Jordanian national, allegedly rode with Ramzi Ahmed Yousef in the bomb-packed van when it was driven into the underground parking lot of the World Trade Center in New York City.Mr. Yousef, the alleged bomb-maker and mastermind of the attack, is to be tried in the fall.Mr. Najim was a participant in, but not an organizer of, the attack, law enforcement sources said.

For Louis R. Anemone, the former New York City Police Department official who orchestrated airlifts atop the World Trade Center after the 1993 bombing there, the most valuable tool is speed. It can make the difference between casualties and survivors in the fight against terrorism, he said. "Time is a luxury in this particular business. It's one you really can't afford," Anemone said in an interview. "You have to try to get everyone to the highest level of readiness as quickly as they can."

NEW YORK -- On the day when a federal grand jury indicted two men in the World Trade Center bombing, an Immigration and Naturalization Service official ruled that the radical Muslim cleric linked to the suspects could be deported.Daniel Meisner of the Executive Office of Immigration Review ruled yesterday that Sheik Omar Abdul Rahman did not tell the INS that he was a polygamist and had been convicted of falsifying a check in his native Egypt in 1987.The 25-page decision by Meisner, an administrative judge with the INS, was not released because Mr. Rahman had earlier requested that the proceedings be held behind closed doors.

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil -- Argentina and Iran are edging toward breaking off relations, and the diplomatic storm centers on a high-ranking Shiite cleric suspected of plotting a 1994 terrorist bombing that killed 87 people.This week, Iran announced that it would recall its charge d'affaires in Argentina for consultations, while four Iranian diplomats and their families left for home."We'll see you in paradise!" one cheerfully told the press.If Argentine prosecutors issue an arrest warrant for Shiite cleric Mohsen Rabbani, as they're contemplating, it could complete the breakdown.

WASHINGTON -- The arrest of a suspect yesterday in a world-riveting bombing brings home to the United States the impact of a growing fundamentalist religious movement that is sending tremors through the Islamic world's political order.A radical Islamic group linked -- so far, indirectly -- to the World Trade Center bombing is believed to have been behind the October 1990 assassination of the speaker of the Egyptian Parliament and to have carried out other armed attacks against Egyptian security officials and Western tourists.

WASHINGTON -- The smuggling of human cargoes and the threat of terrorism have prompted President Clinton to propose a $172.5 million plan for cracking down on illegal immigration.The initiative is aimed at stopping more illegal immigrants at U.S. borders, deporting them more quickly and toughening criminal penalties against traffickers, White House officials said. Border patrols would be bolstered and visa checking systems would be modernized.The Clinton administration is overhauling immigration procedures at a time when Americans increasingly are concerned about a strain on public services by newcomers to the United States.

NEW YORK -- Fourteen of the 15 suspects charged with bombing the World Trade Center and conspiring to launch a wave of terror attacks in New York City have gone on a hunger strike protesting conditions inside the Metropolitan Correctional Center.The suspects are being held at the center on charges that they were involved with the trade center bombing in February, which killed six people and injured 1,000 others. They also allegedly plotted to bomb the United Nations and other structures."They are protesting the bad conditions in the prison," said M. T.Mehdi, president of the National Council on Islamic Affairs.

It's not over for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, not by a long shot. The FBI's handling of problems in its crime lab, detailed in a withering report by the Justice Department last week, amounts to an FBI "Tailhook," the aviator drinking party that ballooned into a major scandal, sunk the Navy's top officers and forever changed the culture of America's oldest and most elite military service.As in Tailhook, the FBI bomb lab's problems began when it ignored the complaints of one of its own, an FBI scientist.

Guilty pleas on seven counts of plotting bombing and murder by one of twelve defendants in the New York terrorism trial fortifies the prosecution's concept of an extremists' war of mayhem.The alleged conspiracy in which Siddig Ibrahim Siddig Ali admitted his part was thwarted by the FBI, thus preventing the planned bombing in July 1993 of the United Nations, a federal office building and two Hudson River auto tunnels plus the assassination of President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and U.S. politicians friendly to Israel.

The bombers of Oklahoma City made war on the people of the United States. All our sympathy goes to the survivors and families of victims of the most murderous terrorist act in the nation's history. But it is not only the federal workers, citizens going about their business and toddlers in the day care center of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building who were victims. So were all of us, in terror for ourselves, fear for others and constraints on our lives. If Oklahoma City, then anywhere in America.

It's not over for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, not by a long shot. The FBI's handling of problems in its crime lab, detailed in a withering report by the Justice Department last week, amounts to an FBI "Tailhook," the aviator drinking party that ballooned into a major scandal, sunk the Navy's top officers and forever changed the culture of America's oldest and most elite military service.As in Tailhook, the FBI bomb lab's problems began when it ignored the complaints of one of its own, an FBI scientist.

It's not over for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, not by a long shot. The FBI's handling of problems in its crime lab, detailed in a withering report by the Justice Department last week, amounts to an FBI "Tailhook," the aviator drinking party that ballooned into a major scandal, sunk the Navy's top officers and forever changed the culture of America's oldest and most elite military service.As in Tailhook, the FBI bomb lab's problems began when it ignored the complaints of one of its own, an FBI scientist.

WASHINGTON -- In a closely held operation, the FBI brought JTC back from Jordan yesterday a heretofore unknown suspect in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, government sources disclosed.Eyad Ismail Najim, a Jordanian national, allegedly rode with Ramzi Ahmed Yousef in the bomb-packed van when it was driven into the underground parking lot of the World Trade Center in New York City.Mr. Yousef, the alleged bomb-maker and mastermind of the attack, is to be tried in the fall.Mr. Najim was a participant in, but not an organizer of, the attack, law enforcement sources said.

The bombers of Oklahoma City made war on the people of the United States. All our sympathy goes to the survivors and families of victims of the most murderous terrorist act in the nation's history. But it is not only the federal workers, citizens going about their business and toddlers in the day care center of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building who were victims. So were all of us, in terror for ourselves, fear for others and constraints on our lives. If Oklahoma City, then anywhere in America.

FROM HOME and abroad voices have begun to counsel America that with communism's death, the world must prepare for a new threat -- radical Islam.This threat is symbolized by the Middle Eastern Muslim fundamentalist, a Khomeini-like creature armed with a radical ideology and nuclear weapons, intent on launching a violent jihad, or holy war, against Western civilization.The image has been magnified by the trial of a group of Muslim terrorists from the Middle East in the bombing of New York's World Trade Center.

Already the dirty, gritty business of bomb work has begun -- investigators in blue fatigues, perhaps in helmets, certainly in gloves, digging through an 8-foot-deep crater, sifting through metal pieces, glass shards and other debris to identify the explosives used in the Oklahoma City blast and track down the terrorists who planted them in a rental truck.It's painstakingly slow work, searching for the tiniest of clues -- a granular chemical residue, a snip of electrical wire, a bit of metal from a timing piece.

WASHINGTON -- Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said yesterday that the United States could have prevented the bombing of the World Trade Center if U.S. officials had heeded his country's warnings about an Islamic fundamentalist network in the United States.But he suggested that the information provided by Egypt related generally to activities by individuals in the United States, not that Egypt had passed on specific information foreshadowing the bombing.Mr. Mubarak called on the new administration to take a more active role in stemming international terrorism, particularly activities inspired by Islamic fundamentalist groups.

Whoever bombed the World Trade Center in New York did not do so because he was a fundamentalist Muslim, but because he was a terrorist. His motives were not religious but political, even if he may deny the distinction. The millions of Muslims in this country did not do it. The hundreds of thousands who might describe themselves as fundamentalist Muslims did not do it. A handful of people who use terror for political ends, and who may be Muslims, did do it.The search for the few who are guilty should not spread hate or fear on the many who are innocent.

Washington -- Two years after a terrorist bomb exploded at New York's World Trade Center, federal investigators believe they have most of the key perpetrators and a motive: anti-Western, anti-American Islamic extremism.But what if the motive was something else: an act of revenge for the 1991 Persian Gulf war and the sanctions that have crippled Iraq ever since? And what if the guiding hand was not Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, the blind Muslim firebrand, but Saddam Hussein?This would make the bombing not just a terrorist act, but an act of war. It would put pressure on the Clinton administration both to retaliate in some way against Iraq and to adjust its theories about emerging post-Cold War security threats.

Guilty pleas on seven counts of plotting bombing and murder by one of twelve defendants in the New York terrorism trial fortifies the prosecution's concept of an extremists' war of mayhem.The alleged conspiracy in which Siddig Ibrahim Siddig Ali admitted his part was thwarted by the FBI, thus preventing the planned bombing in July 1993 of the United Nations, a federal office building and two Hudson River auto tunnels plus the assassination of President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and U.S. politicians friendly to Israel.