Sheik Linked to Terror Suspects Asks to Leave for Afghanistan

WASHINGTON —  Sheik Omar Abdul Rahman, the blind Egyptian cleric who is linked to several figures charged in a New York terror campaign and has been fighting a U.S. deportation order, asked the Justice Department on Wednesday if it would allow him to leave for Afghanistan.

The move is an abrupt about-face in Abdul Rahman’s two-year-long attempt to stave off deportation. But the 55-year-old cleric, now in the federal prison in Otisville, N.Y., thinks he is waging “a fight that he may not win,” said Barbara Nelson, his lawyer.

Whether Afghanistan would accept Abdul Rahman and under what conditions were not clear.

Officials at the Egyptian Embassy here had no comment. Some of Abdul Rahman’s supporters have expressed fears that he would face death if he is sent back to Egypt.

Abdul Rahman, who lived most recently in Jersey City, N.J., has not been charged in the Feb. 26 World Trade Center bombing or the thwarted July 4 plot to blow up the United Nations, two tunnels and other locations. The cleric faces deportation for allegedly lying when he was issued a green card in April, 1991.