LONDON, Dec. 27 -- Richard Colvin Reid, the British drifter who U.S. authorities allege is a foiled airline suicide bomber, reportedly traveled to Israel, Egypt, the Netherlands and Belgium before arriving in Paris and boarding an American Airlines jet last Saturday with plastic explosives embedded in his sneakers.

The new details of Reid's travels, emerging from news reports and statements by intelligence officials in various countries, add further to the contradictory portrait of a onetime petty thief with no job and no fixed address who somehow managed to find the resources for international travel and the know-how to make a sophisticated explosive that fooled even the stringent Paris airport security check.

The shoes contained a highly explosive compound that has been used frequently by terrorists and has been studied by operatives in the al Qaeda network, according to U.S. officials. The compound was used in 1988 to blow up Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, and intelligence officials say they believe large quantities may be in the hands of terrorists based in Libya and other countries.

At the Brixton mosque Reid attended, meanwhile, the cleric in charge warned that extremists were enlisting other gullible young men like Reid and that agents aligned with radical Muslim figures had stepped up recruiting efforts since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States.

Abdul Haqq Baker, chairman of the mosque in the predominantly black South London neighborhood, told the Times newspaper here that he knew of "hundreds of Richard Reids" recruited in Britain, but that British police had ignored his earlier warnings about the spreading militancy.

"Only now are they bothering to follow it up," Baker said. "My fear [is that] this is all too little, too late." He said that since exposing the extremist network's recruiting in Britain, he now fears for his life and his family.

At the same time, an attorney for Reid's mother, Lesley Hughes, issued a statement from her home in Somerset County in southwestern England, saying, "As any mother would be, she is deeply shocked and concerned about the allegations made against her son, but has no further comment to make."

News reports said Somerset residents were surprised at the huge influx of the world's media since Reid was arrested Saturday for allegedly trying to bomb the American Airlines plane en route from Paris to Miami.

Initial FBI tests indicated the material in Reid's shoes contained PETN, a chemical that forms the base of a variety of plastic explosives used by military forces and in some industrial applications, U.S. officials said. The tests also indicated that Reid used nonmetal fuses, which may have made the bombs more difficult to ignite, one U.S. official said.

Last month, a Washington Post reporter in Kabul, Afghanistan, discovered classroom-style notebooks in a house used by al Qaeda recruits; handwritten entries in the notebooks discussed the chemical makeup and efficiency of various types of explosives, including PETN.

Pat Shea, chief operating officer of Ancore Corp., a California company that makes bomb-detection devices, said PETN is "in the top 10 of explosive compounds" in the force and speed of the blast it produces. The chemical is a key ingredient of Semtex, the Czech-made military explosive used in the Lockerbie bombing, and is used in commercial explosives manufactured in the United States.

Investigators are trying to determine whether Reid, who has a Jamaican father and a British mother, may have trained in an al Qaeda camp. Some low-level al Qaeda prisoners being interrogated by U.S. military personnel have said they recall Reid training with them in camps in either Pakistan or Afghanistan, but FBI officials in Washington said they are still working to verify those claims.

Tamar R. Birckhead, a federal public defender in Boston representing Reid, said in a statement this week that Reid's attorneys "are unaware of any evidence to support a link between the offense charged and any terrorist organization or individual." Reid, who is being held at a county jail in Plymouth, Mass., is scheduled to make his second court appearance Friday in Boston.

Police and intelligence officials across the globe today were trying to piece together the details of Reid's movements in recent months, and the emerging picture suggests he may have been more than the aimless drifter suggested in the initial accounts.

Israeli officials, and the Yedioth Aharonoth newspaper, said Reid visited Israel in June for a week. He was interrogated on his arrival at Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion Airport, where security checks for arriving passengers are notoriously strict, but was eventually allowed to enter the country. The French newspaper Le Parisien reported that Reid had also passed through Egypt.

In Amsterdam, officials of the Dutch intelligence service said they were investigating reports that Reid had visited there, possibly earlier this month, and purchased the tennis shoes he wore on board the American Airlines flight. "We are looking into the case and whether Mr. Reid was in Amsterdam," said Vincent van Steen, an agency spokesman.

Reid's next stop was Brussels, where he picked up a new British passport to replace one that had expired. On Dec. 16, he reportedly took a train from Brussels to Paris, where five days later he tried to board the flight to Miami.

He was detained for questioning because, among other things, his passport was new, although he was carrying his expired passport as well. He also aroused suspicion because he possessed no luggage and had paid cash for his ticket.

Reid was cleared that day, Dec. 21, but the questioning took so long that he missed his flight. He stayed at an airport hotel and left the next day. His alleged plot was foiled when flight attendants noticed a burning smell and found Reid using matches to try to light his sneakers. He was restrained by passengers and sedated by two French doctors until the jetliner made an emergency landing at Boston's Logan International Airport, escorted by two F-15 fighters.

French authorities have come under scathing criticism for allowing Reid to pass through security checkpoints without a body search and without being checked by dogs specially trained to sniff out nonmetallic explosives.

Eggen reported from Washington.

© 2001 The Washington Post Company