MOSQUE MAY HOLD KEY TO N.Y. BLAST

Federal investigators are examining possible ties between the bombing of the World Trade Center and several individuals who worshiped at a Jersey City mosque led by an Islamic cleric linked to violence in the U.S. and Egypt.

Brian Dorf, a spokesman for the Jersey City mayor’s office, said police officials working with the Federal Bureau of Investigation had told him of a widening probe that includes some worshipers at the mosque where Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman preaches a fringe brand of Islam.

“There is speculation (among the investigators) that other individuals at the mosque are involved with Middle Eastern factions,” Dorf said.

So far, two men who prayed at the same mosques where Abdel-Rahman delivered his firebrand sermons in Jersey City and Brooklyn have been charged in connection with the bombing.

One is Mohammed A. Salameh, a 25-year-old Palestinian with Jordanian citizenship born, according to the Jordanian government, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank near the town of Nablus. The other is Ibrahim A. Elgabrowny, whose address Salameh used to obtain a New York driver’s license.

Officials say Salameh rented the van believed to have been used in the bombing. They add that a Jersey City storage space, where hundreds of pounds of materials used in explosive-making were found Friday night, also had been rented in his name. Investigators are checking reports Salameh is a trained electrical engineer, according to a source in the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

Salameh has been charged with aiding and abetting the explosion. So far, Elgabrowny has only been charged with obstruction of justice in connection with the probe, although a federal prosecutor said Elgabrowny was a subject of the bombing investigation.

But the investigators doubt that the two men acted alone. Several people connected with Salameh have vanished recently and agents on the case fear they may have fled the country, said a government source.

Three unidentified men in a car stolen from the parking lot of a Boston airport were arrested by agents staking out a Brooklyn mosque Friday evening. But a spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Investigation said there was no evidence the men were connected with the bombing and they were released later that night.

Abdel-Rahman condemned the trade center bombing on Friday, issuing a statement through an associate that “no Muslim could ever act like this.”

But investigators in Jersey City clearly were trying to expand their probe to look at the mosque and other followers of the cleric.

Abdel-Rahman’s name surfaced during the investigations of the 1981 assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, the 1990 slaying of Rabbi Meir Kahane, and the 1990 killing of a Brooklyn electrician who clashed with the cleric over the control of funds collected to aid Muslim rebels in Afghanistan.

Each time it was Abdel-Rahman’s words more than his deeds that formed the connection.

The charismatic preacher, then living in Egypt, had condemned Sadat’s regime as contrary to Islam; his words were strong enough that the Egyptian government used them to put him on trial for the assassination. He was eventually acquitted.

El-Sayyid Nosair, the man convicted of crimes related to the Kahane slaying worshiped in a Brooklyn mosque where Abdel-Rahman preached.

Letters under the cleric’s name had been posted in area mosques shortly before the murder of the electrician, Mustafa Shalabi, instructing worshipers he was a bad Muslim and should be spurned.

M.T. Mehdi, an associate of the sheik, secretary general of the New York-based National Council of Islamic Affairs, said Abdel-Rahman’s words have been “really taken out of context.”

For example, when Abdel-Rahman calls for a jihad, he “means self-defense, the struggle for sustenance, the struggle for self-improvement,” Mehdi said. “But in the American language, they have translated jihad to mean a holy war . . . All wars are ugly and unholy.”

John Esposito, a professor of Middle Eastern studies at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., described Abdel-Rahman as a popular Islamic leader and preacher rather than an Islamic scholar: “(He) can be very persuasive with his (Egyptian) following and he’s managed to be fairly impressive here also.”

Cherif Bassiouni, a Middle East expert and law professor at Loyola University in Chicago, said Abdel-Rahman’s appeal is limited essentially to Egypt’s impoverished lower classes, where it flourishes on “the grounds of discontent.”

Bassiouni characterized the cleric’s teachings as the “oversimplification of problems and solutions, playing on the anger and frustration of people, emphasizing the corruption of government . . . and the use of unsophisticated language, studded with not only colloquial language but also profanity, which amuses people.”

With only four years of theological training, Bassiouni said, Abdel-Rahman would have been qualified for lesser responsibilities in the Islamic community.

“People like him usually get a job with the ministry of religious affairs where they get assigned to the equivalent of a parish in Egypt,” he said. Scholars who conclude the full 12 years of advanced secular training would be slated for more important jobs.

“Those with a lesser level of education or who may be considered less articulate or less knowledgeable would get the more popular type parishes where you have people who are not very literate,” Bassiouni said.

Alexander Bardosh, professor of philosophy at Queens College in New York and also an Islamic scholar, said Abdel-Rahman’s physical disability added to his appeal.

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“The fact that he’s blind has something to do with it,” Bardosh said. “In the Islamic religion there’s a great deal of tolerance for blind people who are thought to have special prophetic abilities.”

For all his popularity among the impoverished, Abdel Rahman has little stature in the mainstream of Islam.

“He is somebody who speaks on the fringe of the fringes of Islamic fundamentalism, so not only is he unrepresentative of Islam, but he’s also unrepresentative of Islamic fundamentalism,” said As’ad Abu Kahlil, visiting professor of Middle Eastern studies at Georgetown University.

The U.S. State Department years ago placed the cleric on a list of foreigners forbidden to enter the country. But he was given a tourist visa to the United States through an error by the U.S. Embassy in Sudan.

Immigration officials have been trying to deport him for a year, but his case is on appeal on the grounds that he is entitled to political asylum from persecution by the Egyptian government.

The links between Abdel-Rahman and the trade center bombing are tenuous.

Dorf said Salameh, who rented the van believed to have been used in the bombing, attended the Al Salam mosque where Abdel-Rahman preached. Dorf cited information he and police investigators received separately from the local Arab community.

Yet Mohamed Magib, a spokesman for the mosque, said nobody in the small religious group remembered seeing him at services.

The address on Salameh’s New York driver’s license was that of an apartment rented by Elgabrowny, who is a cousin of Nosair.

Nosair, also a follower of Abdel-Rahman, is serving a 7- to 23-year prison sentence on charges of gun possession, assault and coercion related to Kahane’s slaying.

Elgabrowny, also said to attend the sheik’s sermons, was arrested Thursday after he hit two investigators who stopped him from returning to his apartment during a police search. He was at the time carrying forged Nicaraguan passports for Nosair and Nosair’s family, according to an affidavit used to charge Elgabrowny with obstruction of justice.

Investigators, hoping to test Elgabrowny’s hands for traces of explosive-making materials, had refused to allow him to wash or wet his hands. But when given a chance to go to the restroom, he plunged his hands into a urine-filled toilet, said Assistant U.S. Atty. Henry DePippo.