The path to the Brooklyn office begins in Peshawar. For centuries the northern Pakistan city was a dusty trading crossroads near the Khyber Pass. But Peshawar emerged in the early 1980s as a thriving staging area for Muslims headed to fight Soviet aggression in Afghanistan. The call to arms was led by Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian scholar and former professor at the Sharia (Islamic Law) faculty of Jordan University. Azzam remained an idol at the school, which later counted among its students young Mohammed Salameh, indicted last week for aiding in the blast. Azzam called the Afghan war “pure jihad.” For young Palestinian men, it was a way to strike a blow for Muslim identity. The holy warriors included two sons of Egyptian cleric Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman. Rahman himself traveled to Peshawar twice, staying for several months in 1990.

To broaden the movement, Azzam sent a trusted lieutenant, Mustafa Shalabi, to the United States. Shalabi preached widely in the United States and settled into the Atlantic Avenue storefront office. Among the services he offered the faithful was weapons training. Court records say one of the Alkifah members who sharpened his eye at a Connecticut shooting range in 1989 was El Sayyid Nosair, tried and acquitted in the 1990 murder of radical Zionist Meir Kahane. Nosair, convicted on weapons charges related to the case, was visited in prison by Salameh. He is also a distant cousin of another figure indicted last week, Ibrahim Elgabrowny.

One volunteer who became a trusted assistant in Shalabi’s Brooklyn circle was Mahmud Abouhalima, an Egyptian cabdriver and Afghan-war veteran now sought by bombing investigators. The two quickly became friends, according to a man who knew them both. Shalabi even employed Abouhalima in his electrical-contracting business. “They were very cooperative with each other,” said the acquaintance. Federal investigators have told NEWSWEEK that witnesses place Salameh and Abouhalima at a New York-area gas station the night before the blast. Salameh was reportedly driving a van. Officials say Abouhalima, who disappeared after the bombing, may be in Pakistan.

In 1990 Rahman, who had been under arrest in Egypt for his links to terrorism, slipped into the United States. Shalabi welcomed him, providing an apartment and making Abouhalima available as a driver and personal assistant. But as the Russians retreated from Afghanistan’ the holy warriors began turning against each other. Azzam and two of his sons were killed by a car bomb in Peshawar in 1989. According to a friend of Shalabi’s, Rahman and Shalabi clashed over the center’s mission. Rahman believed his quest for an Islamic state in Egypt had a basis in the Koran; Shalabi did not. During the gulf war, a leaflet signed by Rahman denounced Shalabi as a bad Muslim. In March 1991 he was found murdered in his apartment. The case has never been solved.

There is still no clear connection between this legacy of violence and the trade-center bombing. Rahman, who went on a media counteroffensive last week, denies any knowledge of Abouhalima, Salameh, Shalabi’s death or the bombing. Federal investigators concede that they have no hard evidence against the cleric. But NEWSWEEK has learned that authorities are still pursuing possible Iranian and Pakistani connections to the money trail that fed cash to Salameh and Nidal Ayyad, the other alleged coconspirator indicted last week, as well as Rahman. Under special scrutiny are a half dozen semipublic Iranian foundations that pay out millions in welfare checks and benefits to veterans of the Iran-Iraq War. State Department experts say that heavily endowed organizations like the Foundation for the Oppressed and Disabled often use their philanthropy as a cover for subsidies to terrorists. But investigators acknowledge that nearly a month after the blast, they have a skein of tantalizing leads-without a clear direction. After a series of investigative breaks and quick arrests, the probe may be entering a second and more painstaking phase.