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Lased Ben Heni craved a glorious death. On a visit to the seedy apartment of a Tunisian friend, Essid Sami Ben Khemais, in a Milan suburb last March, the intense 32-year-old Libyan chafed at the strictures imposed on martyrdom by al-Qaeda.

Any dramatic action against "the enemies of God," he complained, required authorization of "Sheik Ali Abdullah" — an alias, according to the Italian antiterrorism officials bugging the conversation, for bin Laden himself.

"There’s too much planning. I’m only asking to be allowed to fight them, so I won’t have to respond to anybody here or there," Ben Heni griped. "The day that they choose me or I am killed, I want to respond only to God." He has a few other authorities to answer to first. On Oct. 10 Bavarian police arrested Ben Heni on an Italian warrant at the decrepit Munich rooming house that city welfare authorities had allocated to him in July. His conditions there could hardly have been less glorious: his Yugoslav roommate was battling advanced cancer, and Ben Heni himself, who had been granted political asylum in Germany in 1994, has been diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, a painful inflammation of the intestinal tract. Now he awaits extradition to Italy to face a charge of being part of a group suspected of planning an attack last January on the U.S. embassy in Rome. Last week his earthly belongings — some clothes, leather motorcycle gloves, a Koran and 60 pages of Arabic texts printed off the Internet — were still in a box in a dank Munich basement.

Ben Heni’s tantalizing reference to al-Qaeda’s heavy-handed superstructure is just a fragment in a vexing puzzle investigators are piecing together with painstaking effort and at a frantic pace. Particularly for European investigators, the ongoing probe into the Sept. 11 attacks feeds directly into the pressing effort to prevent future terrorist cataclysms. And they may well come in Europe. In the last year alone, security officials have found evidence of plans for at least five attacks on European soil. No one is in a position even to guess at how many more are being conjured up.

But there is no question that for years Europe has harbored the al-Qaeda plotters and their predecessors as they hatched terrorist attacks going back at least to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. They may have come from Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt or the Gulf states, but they chose to work out their schemes on the Continent. Their spiritual home may have been Saudi Arabia, their training ground Afghanistan and their hated target America, but the terrorists chose to live in Germany, Spain, Italy, England and Belgium. And many still do.

The F.B.I.’s prime effort in Europe remains to illuminate the background of the attacks on New York and Washington — the crucial spadework for which, as U.S. and German ministers acknowledged last week, was done in Hamburg by the cell around Mohamed Atta, the presumed organizer of the Sept. 11 assaults. He and two of the other hijackers and three alleged accomplices lived in or frequented the same appartment at various times and many of them attended the same mosque.

No evidence has yet surfaced definitively linking the Atta cell with any of the others identified in the past year in Europe, hardening suspicions that the Hamburg unit worked on its own. A few gaps, though, were filled last week. The trail of the three fugitive members of the cell — Zakariya Essabar, Said Bahaji and Ramzi Binalshibh — was found to have led to the $15-a-night Embassy Hotel in downtown Karachi. After arriving in the early morning of Sept. 4 on a Turkish Airlines flight, Bahaji checked in using his own name, and two men thought to be Essabar and Binalshibh registered as "Abdullah Husaini," a Belgian national, and "Amar Moula" from France. The three made a series of phone calls from a nearby payphone, slept in Room 318 and left the next morning on a PIA flight to Quetta near the Afghan border. From there, presumably, the trio could find easy passage to Afghanistan with days to spare before the attacks on the U.S. Also last week, Czech Interior Minister Stanislav Gross confirmed that Atta himself made "contact" last spring — well after he moved to the U.S. — with Ahmed Kh. I. Samir Al-Ani, whom Gross described as "an officer of the Iraqi intelligence service." He offered no details on what they discussed.

While some Europeans may assume that America’s high profile will continue to make it the terrorists’ prime target, investigators from Spain to Russia insist that such presumption is unwarranted. Across the Continent, more than 30 key suspects have been arrested since Sept. 11 for alleged links to Islamic terrorism. That may represent a mere fraction of the criminal potential: Europe is a key destination for many of the 11,000 men, according to FBI estimates, who have passed through al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan. The bulk of them, presumably, aren’t there anymore.

Some of them no doubt left wearied by the physical hardship, numb to the bellicose rhetoric and determined to pursue a peaceful life. But the rest? "They are scattered around the world," said Mohammed al-Massari, a dissident Saudi physicist who moves in London’s militant Muslim circles. "Even if they have nothing to do with al-Qaeda, they take the model of al-Qaeda and do it on their own." The European arrests suggest what a varied group remains committed and underground, set on jihad. There are computer engineers and transient workers, some garbed in piety and others disguised as hedonists. Some have direct ties to bin Laden’s lieutenants. Others appear pulled along by a tide of fraternal allegiance to the cause of jihad, determined to even the score in a battle first joined not only in Afghanistan, but also in Bosnia, Chechnya and an Islamic world they view as controlled by repressive and apostate regimes.

Al-Qaeda, as we now know it, has been under the noses of European security services for years, but it was perceived by some as just one threat among many. "In Europe we were too preoccupied with our own terrorist problems — E.T.A. in Spain, the I.R.A. in the U.K., the Corsicans in France and so on — and we devoted our resources to these threats," admits a Spanish security official. "Even after the attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the Islamic threat seemed distant. Everything changed after Sept. 11. Before then we looked on bin Laden as someone from another planet, like a Martian."

In the Encyclopedia of jihad, a how-to guide to holy war that French terrorism expert Roland Jacquard believes was commissioned by bin Laden’s inner circle, the instructions are precisely of the sort Ben Heni allegedly quailed at: lie low, blend in, bide your time. "The mujahed should be young, so he can start the mission 10 years before the start of the jihad," states the manual. In fact, according to European terrorism experts, several of those arrested in recent weeks have been at their posts for many years, though usually without the lucrative business cover the manual recommends.

Not all of them set their wills on war in Afghanistan. In December 1999 and again earlier this year, Western intelligence services have met to explore the striking preponderance in bin Laden’s network of Algerian radicals, whose long experience fighting against the Algerian army has made them operationally savvy. "The real problem in Europe before 1998 was Algerian nationals, who were involved in mostly single episodes that weren’t coordinated," says Stefano Dambruoso, the Milan prosecutor handling the case against the Milan cell. "After that, bin Laden began to connect and coordinate all these cells that already existed, rendering the phenomenon much more radicalized and potent."

The French are acutely aware of the potency of Algerian terrorism and see it reflected in al-Qaeda. In 1994 — in what was a grim precursor of attacks to come — guerrillas of Algeria’s Armed Islamic Group (G.I.A.) hijacked an Air France plane in Algiers, intending to crash it in the middle of Paris; they were killed by French commandos while refueling in Marseilles. In the G.I.A.’s subsequent brutal bombing campaign in Paris, terrorists tried to blow up the St. Michel metro station, tucked below a national monument, Notre Dame Cathedral — just as al-Qaeda tried twice to take out the World Trade Center. "The history of fundamentalist Islamist terrorism isn’t exactly a huge book — you only need to go back 10 to 15 years to get the entire story," notes investigating magistrate Jean-François Ricard, who along with Jean-Louis Bruguière leads the French antiterrorist effort. "You learn a lot about their capacity to strike and the kinds of targets that interest them, by reviewing the past and factoring in the potential for adaptation."

The old fights feed the new ones — or as Ricard puts it, "while cells and even entire networks may have different origins, they all look to al-Qaeda and bin Laden as the great leader, the umbrella under which all these groups fall." Several suspected terrorists identified in Bosnia in recent weeks have been linked to both the G.I.A. and al-Qaeda. Another case in point: in late September Spanish police arrested six Algerians on suspicion of being part of the al-Qaeda network and planning attacks against U.S. interests in Europe. The six are all members of a G.I.A. splinter organization, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, which according to several European antiterrorist officials has largely melded into al-Qaeda. In the northern Spanish town of Cascante, police secured 32 videotapes in the apartment of one of those arrested, Mohammed Belaziz. Among them were shaky handheld videos of four Algerian soldiers dying in a burning jeep, their throats slit; in the same cache were images of Chechen rebels exhorting a crowd to kill and another of Palestinian suicide bombers dressed in white as they prepare to go to their deaths.

Similar agitprop was frequent viewing for the Milan cell. Neighbors figured the constant explosions they heard through the walls indicated the men’s predilection for action films; in fact they were watching some of the estimated 150 videos of combat in Chechnya and Afghanistan secured by police. Italian investigators say that in six months of eavesdropping on the group, they heard not a word spoken about women.