Outside the empty apartment of one of the fugitives, an "enemy of the state," stand the slippers of his wife and mother, one pair is white, the other green. A neighbor says that Azad Ekinci's entire family disappeared from Bingöl the evening of the attacks on the two synagogues in Istanbul.

The neighbor doesn't want to believe what has since then appeared in the newspaper about Ekinci and his wife. Yes, the veiled wife of the man suspected of orchestrating the attacks admitted that her husband fought in the Jihad, that it would have been better if the assaults had been carried out directly in America or England, but that Turkey also belongs to the "Dar al-Harb," the abode of war where the infidels rule.

"We only knew the everyday faces of these people," says Ekinci's cousin, editor-in-chief of "The Voice of Bingöl," the local paper of the East Anatolian town. "Azad may have been religious and introverted, but he was a man completely involved in life. Many people here knew him. He can't have fooled us all."

At first the Turkish authorities thought Ekinci was the fourth of the suicide bombers who lost their lives in the attack on the Istanbul Headquarters of the British HSBC bank. Meanwhile, it has been established that it was another man who lit the fuse of that bomb. Ekinci, codename Abu Nidal, is alive and left Turkey presumably heading for Syria. At the moment he is the most-wanted man in Turkey.

Turkish investigators say four "Imams" directed the group behind the attacks. Two of them have been identified - Azad Ekinci and Habib Aktaz. Both were trained in Pakistan; both have met with the Egyptian Aiman al-Sawahiri, Osama Bin Laden's second in command and chief of operations for al Qaeda.

A month and a half before the attack, the group had ten potential suicide assassins standing by. Four of them are now dead; six other "living bombs" might still be active, according to the Turkish secret service MIT. Many of them, like the synagogue attacker, Mesut Çabuk, fought in Chechnya.

The authorities estimate that the circle of domestic and foreign financiers backing the network consists of 30 individuals. The so-called intelligence group that is looking for more sympathizers in mosques throughout Turkey comprises about 150. Three weeks after the attacks, officials now see the group in a significantly different light.

The suspicion that radical Islamic groups from the Kurdish region in southeast Turkey played a role has been largely refuted. Ekinci and Çabuk are accused of having long-standing contacts with the Turkish Hezbollah, an extremely brutal counter-guerilla organization which in the early nineties, with state support, fought against Abdullah Öcalan's Kurdish Workers Party (PKK). But Gökhan Elaltuntaz who set off the bomb in front of Istanbul's Newe-Shalom Synagogue doesn't fit this picture. His family in Bingöl had trouble with Hezbollah's protection-money extortionists.

Terrorism expert Ümit Özdag believes the "Front of Champions for a Great Islamic East" (IBDA-C) which originally claimed credit for the attacks is just along for the ride. Israeli secret service agents confirm that for three years there have probably been offshoots in Germany which could have carried out attacks of such magnitude - but there is no proof of their participation. Özdag's disturbing findings: "They have quite enough to do building up their cells in Western Europe."

At first the investigators saw clear parallels with the five simultaneous bombings in Morocco, where on May 16th a group of young assassins from the slums of Casablanca -not all of whom have been identified - attacked Jewish and foreign targets.

But here too the differences stand out: Elaltuntaz, the Newe Shalom bomber, came from a prosperous Bingöl family with Turkish nationalists leanings. His parents buried his body in a lavishly set family grave in the idyllic cemetery outside of town. Çabuk's father is the head of a branch of the Ministry of Agriculture. Ekinci's father, a union official, was murdered in the late seventies.

Another highly atypical suicide bomber is Ilyas Kuncak, 47, who was identified only last week as the terrorist who detonated the car bomb in front of the HSBC bank. Kuncak, born in Ankara, was a successful wholesaler of spices, a middle class Turk.

The experts are surprised by the social mix of the group. It is reminiscent of the September 11, 2001 terrorists. "We just don't know enough to be able to explain this phenomenon," Özdag says.

The daily newspaper, Milliyet, writes of an "amorphous mass," a "poisonous cloud." The camouflage of the seemingly randomly lumped-together troop functioned with astonishing perfection: Not a single relative, except for Ekinci's wife who was apparently in on her husband's activities, had even the slightest suspicion.

In October, Gökhan Elaltuntaz's father, Sefik, spent three weeks with his son in Istanbul. "We were preparing for his wedding," the building contractor says. He is an elegant gentleman who has worn black ever since the attack. His son must have been brainwashed, he assumed at first. Meanwhile, he says, "If Gökhan did that knowingly, I would wish he hadn't been my son."

Menderes Elibol, the brother of a textile merchant in whose stockroom in the old section of Istanbul the police found suspicious chemicals, says he "would string up" his brother Hidir "with my own hands" if the accusation by the prosecuting attorney's office should be confirmed. Yes, Hidir did some business with Habib Aktaz, the man suspected of being behind the attacks, but he had been a thoroughly average Muslim, who "like all of us went to pray in the Mosque on Fridays."

The one feature, according to the investigators, that ties almost all the suspects together, is their association with Salafism, a fundamentalist movement in Islam to which Bin Laden also adheres. The Salafis, who appeared on the scene originally as reformers, preach a puritanical return to the roots of the faith.

The Salafi trail, it seems, leads for the time being to Syria which last week handed over to Ankara the Turkish preacher Hilmi Tugluoglu and 21 of his followers - pleasing the Turkish diplomatic corps, but annoying the police. For Syria apparently acted too hastily.

At his first hearing, Tugluoglu admitted that on the day he was arrested in Damascus he had intended to meet with Ekinci and others who pulled the strings behind the Istanbul attacks. They could all have been arrested, the police say. Now it will be that much harder to uncover the connections between the Turkish cells and the men abroad who give the orders. The investigators are convinced these men exist.

The chief suspect of the Turkish secret service is Abu Mussab al-Sarkawi, a former al Qaeda commander who for about two years is said to have been living in Iran and Iraq. According to secret service findings, the Jordanian-born al-Sarkawi has been in contact with the Northern Iraqi terror group Ansar al-Islam which is blamed for terrorist attacks in Baghdad and Northern Iraq. The attacks in Istanbul are said to have been coordinated by the Baiat al-Imam group which al-Sarkawi controls.

Turkish observers say it is ironic that the government of the chastened Islamist Recep Tayyip Erdogan should have to fight Islamic terror in Turkey. His opponents now spitefully reproach him for the radical speeches he made and the contacts he had in his early years. A 1988 photograph, recently dug up by the Istanbul daily Star, shows him half kneeling in front of the Afghan Mujahadin leader Gulbuddin Hekmatjar whom the U.S. today counts among the 20 most dangerous terrorists in the world.