Siddig Ibrahim Siddig Ali, the 32-year-old Sudanese immigrant whom federal authorities have placed at the center of a conspiracy to bomb the United Nations and other targets in New York City, confided to an FBI informer that he had helped test the bomb for the World Trade Center blast in February, according to federal officials.
That explosion, Siddig Ali was quoted in a federal complaint as saying, was a message that "we can get you anytime."Another suspect, Clement Rodney Hampton-El also told the informer that he had participated in the preparations for the Trade Center explosion.
The statements were some of the many links that emerged Thursday between the latest eight suspects, the trade center defendants, the man charged with the 1990 killing of Rabbi Meir Kahane and Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the Islamic fundamentalist cleric.
How close and substantive the links between the two bomb plots and the many Islamic figures would turn out to be remained unclear Thursday night. But senior officials in the Clinton administration said the latest arrests gave a new and broader dimension to what had until now been regarded as a narrow plot aimed at the World Trade Center.
The group of men arrested on Thursday and the trade center suspects were assembling similar bombs, mainly composed of fertilizer, federal officials said. The two groups also had a shared world of common associates, religious beliefs and causes.
A senior law-enforcement official said the conspirators were apparently planning to carry out the bombings on or near the Fourth of July.
Law-enforcement officials said several of the latest suspects were close to Abdel Rahman, a blind, self-exiled Egyptian who calls for the overthrow of that country's secular government.
Abdel Rahman had emerged before as a tantalizing figure to law-enforcement authorities. His militant preachings attracted some of the trade center defendants as well as El-Sayyid A. Nosair, an Egyptian who was convicted on lesser charges related to the Kahane killing. But the authorities had never called him a suspect or even questioned him.
For the first time on Thursday, however, Federal agents searched his spare Jersey City apartment on Fairview Avenue.
At a news conference announcing the arrests of the eight men, James M. Fox, the head of the New York office of the FBI, said that "at this time, we have no plans to arrest the sheik." But hours later, a senior law-enforcement official said that "significant documents" were found and that Attorney General Janet Reno would have to make the decision about how agents would proceed with the cleric. The official did not elaborate.
"I did not do anything to break American law," the Abdel Rahman insisted, speaking through an interprter who kept a cloth over his head to hide his features. "I have absolutely nothing to do with what happened."