The $400 Bomb

By Jill Smolowe

Assembling the explosives that blew out seven stories of the World Trade Center sounds so simple that it is easy to forget just how dangerous it is. First, go to any gardening center and chemical-supply house. For little more than $400, buy several 100-lb. bags of urea and some bottles of nitric and sulfuric acid. Mix the urea and acids into a thick paste, put the glop in plastic bags, then pack them in a cardboard box. Next attach either a blasting cap or a detonator made of some batteries, an alarm clock and a container of nitroglycerine. But be very, very careful. "If it spills on the floor, and you scuff your shoe in it," says an explosives expert, "you could make it go off."

Before playing with such ingredients, it helps to have a degree in chemical engineering, like the man federal agents arrested last week and added to their list of suspects in connection with the bombing of the World Trade Center. The ease with which the agents found him suggests a criminal so careless that it was hard to imagine him pulling off such a delicate mission. And despite astonishingly swift police work, the absence of a motive left several key questions unresolved. Given the size of the bomb, why target a parking garage, where the cost to human life would be relatively small? Given the failure of any group to claim responsibility before the blast, is it possible the bomb went off prematurely? If so, what was the intended target? And who was providing the cash?

The black comedy of errors that followed the explosion suggests either a costly mistake -- or the work of rank amateurs. By the time federal agents arrested Nidal Ayyad, 25, at his home in Maplewood, New Jersey, they had ( several pieces of evidence linking him to the first suspect seized, Mohammed Salameh, starting with the business card they found in Salameh's pocket. Although Ayyad is from Kuwait and Salameh is from Jordan, both men are of Palestinian descent and they have been friends for more than a year. One of Ayyad's brothers says they met at a mosque, though it is still not certain if he was referring to Al-Salam Mosque in Jersey City, where Salameh worshipped on occasion and Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, a radical Egyptian cleric, often preaches.

The federal complaint against Ayyad states that on Feb. 25, the day before the blast, Salameh made several trips to a storage shed in Jersey City, where he kept his bombmaking materials. Four times that day he phoned from a nearby booth to Ayyad's office at AlliedSignal, calls that Salameh's lawyer, Robert Precht, insists concerned "a family matter." Moreover, the complaint states, sometime around Feb. 15, Ayyad rented a red General Motors sedan and listed "Salameh" as a second driver. A Ryder truck-rental employee says that on Feb. 23, when Salameh rented the yellow van believed to have been used in the bombing, he was accompanied by a man driving a red General Motors sedan.

Perhaps most intriguing, the two men shared a joint bank account at the branch of the National Westminster Bank located near Al-Salam Mosque, where investigators say the men placed several deposits of less than $10,000. Federal agents say at least $8,000 was transferred to the account from Germany last year and was withdrawn by Salameh. One bank employee said, "We are talking about small amounts -- well under anything that would raise any kind of suspicion." Precht insists that the total account never exceeded $10,000 and was closed shortly before Ayyad's marriage last December.

The evidence that an overseas group might have been funneling funds to militants in the U.S. prompted some experts to speculate that the bombing may represent the prototype for a new kind of terrorism, and not only because it was the first major attack on American soil. Before this incident, there was little evidence that terrorists had the infrastructure in the U.S. to organize and plan operations. "What the tower bombing suggests is that under our noses they've been building up," says Bruce Hoffman of the Rand Corp. "It may not be a typical Islamic terrorist organization that comes to mind -- not full- time terrorists that live life underground plotting operations. These could be part-time terrorists that are in isolated cells."

The two men do not fit the profile of the typical terrorist bomber. Ayyad's relatives depict the chemical engineer as a devout Muslim who had achieved the American Dream since immigrating from Kuwait eight years ago. In 1991 he became a naturalized citizen, earned a bachelor's degree from Rutgers University and began work at AlliedSignal. A year later, his mother arranged for him to marry a Middle Eastern woman.

Salameh, by contrast, was a drifter, never settling into a permanent home or regular job. His grades in school were so mediocre that he could not get into the university law or science programs; his only option was to attend the University of Jordan's college of religious law, where one professor recalls that Salameh was involved in fundamentalist student activities.

Back in the Jordanian city of Zarka, his father and brothers wept openly as they insisted Salameh was innocent. They spoke of the many letters they had received from Salameh praising the free and democratic society in which he now lived. They also received financial help. A local money changer says he cashed checks from America for sums that ran as high as four figures. "Mohammed wanted to go to the U.S.A. to make money and help me," says his father Amin Abdul-raheem Salameh, a retired Jordanian army officer. "He said, 'I am ready to work in America as a toilet cleaner or garbage collector rather than stay here.' " It is a decision Salameh may now regret.

With reporting by Edward Barnes and John F. Dickerson/New York and Jamil Hamad/Zarka