8th Bomb Found; Fbi Investigates Cleric’s Followers

An eighth letter bomb surfaced Friday as investigators pursued the possibility that the booby-trapped greeting cards were sent by followers of an Egyptian cleric imprisoned for conspiring to wage terror in the United States.

Chris Murray, a spokesman for the FBI’s Washington field office, called that theory “an important lead we will look at closely.”

The latest letter bomb was found at the Leavenworth, Kan., post office. Like two others found Thursday at the Leavenworth federal prison, it was addressed to “parole officer” at the prison.

Five others were found Thursday addressed to the Washington office of the Arabic newspaper Al-Hayat. All eight bore postmarks from Alexandria, Egypt.

The officials described the devices as thick white envelopes that looked as if they might contain Christmas greeting cards but instead held detonation mechanisms and flattened slabs of plastic explosive, probably a common one known as Semtex, officials said.

Three followers of Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, the radical Muslim cleric convicted with nine others in 1995 of conspiring to bomb the United Nations and other New York City landmarks, are inmates at the federal prison in Leavenworth.