A chemical engineer who federal authorities say shared a bank account with a key suspect in the World Trade Center bombing was charged Wednesday with aiding and abetting the blast.
Nidal Ayyad, 25, a Palestinian-American born in Kuwait, was arrested by the FBI in a predawn raid on his Maplewood, N.J., home. He was the second person to be charged with direct links to the bombing that killed five people and tore a six-story hole in the basement of the city landmark Feb. 26.
Ayyad was brought before a federal magistrate in Newark and held without bail pending a hearing Friday.
Federal officials said Ayyad shared a bank account with Mohammed Salameh, 25, the main bombing suspect thus far. Ayyad’s business card was found in Salameh’s possession when he was arrested March 4 in Jersey City.
Federal investigators told The New York Times that they believe $8,000 used to finance the bombing was transferred in recent months from Europe to the New Jersey bank account used by the two suspects.
One official said the existence of a money trail “suggests some foreign group was financing them.” No source for the funds was identified.
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Ayyad is a research engineer for Allied-Signal Inc. in Morristown, N.J., which makes engineered materials and aerospace and automotive products. The company said it suspended him Wednesday.
An FBI official said Ayyad’s background in chemicals was significant, but neither he nor other investigators would say whether they believed he had a role in making the bomb.
A federal complaint said Ayyad rented a red General Motors car 11 days before the bombing and listed “an additional driver as `Salameh.’ ” A man in a red GM car accompanied Salameh on Feb. 23 to the rental agency where Salameh picked up a van believed later to have contained the bomb.
The complaint also said four calls to Ayyad’s phone at work had been made from a pay phone near a storage facility containing chemicals that could have been used to make the bomb. It said Salameh “was observed making several telephone calls” from that phone.
A professor who taught two engineering courses to Ayyad at Rutgers University, from which he graduated in 1991, told The Associated Press that the suspect was a fairly ordinary student who worked part time off-campus, took many summer classes and earned average grades.
The professor, Jeffrey Rankin, said the courses included how “to analyze mathematically chemical reactions” and “how to design chemical reactors in industry.”
While some principles applicable to bombmaking were involved, “there certainly was not enough material in the class to learn how to make a bomb,” Rankin said.
A 14-year-old boy, identified as Ayyad’s brother-in-law, said an FBI team arrested the suspect before 7 a.m. in the home in Maplewood.
“Everybody was asleep. They broke down the door and immediately handcuffed me and my brothers,” said the boy, who declined to give his name.
A woman identified as Ayyad’s wife wiped away tears during the arraignment while the suspect’s mother tried to comfort her.
Ayyad’s father, Abdel-Rahman Yusuf Ayyad, collapsed outside the courtroom and later was treated for a rapid heartbeat.
The elder Ayyad said Salameh had visited his son in his Maplewood home, but did not know how often or how recently the visits took place.