THE SMOOTH ASSASSIN

By Johanna McGeary/Jerusalem

TAK. TAK. TAK. UNDER EERIE YELLOW strobe lights at 3 a.m. in Tel Aviv's newly named Yitzhak Rabin Square, Yigal Amir again fired a pistol at a victim less than a yard away. This time the gun was a toy and the Prime Minister, whom Amir assassinated on the same spot 12 days before, was played by a policeman. Amir wore a white bulletproof vest, and a chain around his waist yoked him to police escorts while he coolly re-enacted the killing for official video cameras. "Murderer, die! Maniac! You piece of garbage!" shouted Israelis from behind the barricades.

In Israel it is customary for confessed murderers to re-enact their crimes, and Amir performed so smoothly that there can be no doubt about what he did and how he did it. What kind of help he had, however, is still unresolved. Security forces keep proclaiming the assassination sprang from a conspiracy, but they have yet to offer hard evidence of the theory. Police and secret-service interrogators have spent days questioning the eight young religious zealots in custody, yet they do not seem to have found proof of an organized network acting on orders from any hierarchy.

Intelligence sources say that only three of the suspects--Yigal, his brother Hagai and their friend Dror Adani--made up a self-appointed cell of executioners and will be charged with plotting to kill Rabin. Margalit Har-Shefi, 20, a female student at Bar Ilan University, was the latest suspect to be arrested. When she was taken to court, police described her as a "central and dominant figure" and part of the "inner circle" with the other three. But intelligence sources say Har-Shefi, a friend of Amir's, was most likely to be guilty only of teasing him to follow through on his boasts about killing Rabin.

Those four and the others in custody shared the mind-set of Jewish extremism, and made plans to attack Arabs. But security officials believe the suspects outside the inner circle may have known only generally about the assassination plot and failed to stop it. Last week Avishai Raviv, the acknowledged leader of the secretive extremist group Eyal, was released under house arrest, indicating he was probably not involved in the assassination itself. It is thought he may have turned state's witness. But investigators are not finding it easy to crack all the suspects. While some, like Hagai Amir, quickly told police what they wanted to know, Yigal has offered only intermittent cooperation aside from his confession, and others are not breaking down as hoped. The investigators have long experience successfully grilling Palestinians, but they cannot apply the same harsh psychological and physical methods to Israelis: the law forbids many such techniques except to prevent an imminent act of terror. Meanwhile, the milder pressures--sleep deprivation, no clean clothes, no visits with attorneys--have failed to elicit all the information police are seeking. Investigators, "are still in considerable darkness," says an intelliegence source.

The head of Shin Bet, Israel's domestic secret service, admitted that when an informant warned the government in the spring about an impending attempt on Rabin's life, security forces did not respond. Reserve soldier Shlomi Halevi told military intelligence on June 15 that he was in a toilet stall in a Tel Aviv bus station men's room at 12:30 a.m. when he overheard an ominous conversation. He claimed two men were discussing how a short Yemenite man wearing a yarmulke planned to murder Rabin, and had even twice confessed his intentions in synagogue. He already had the pistol, one of them said. But security officials who heard the report decided it was not specific enough to act on.

Last week Halevi acknowledged that he had spun a tale about the encounter: in fact his information was more precise and accurate than he conveyed. His friend Hila Frank, a right-wing activist at Bar Ilan, specifically named Amir as the plotter. Halevi had wanted to warn police without damaging Amir if the story proved untrue.

Eager to substantiate their conspiracy theories, police are also trying to trace a thread of responsibility to rabbis who might have issued the Jewish equivalent of a Muslim fatwa, offering religious sanction for political murder. On Thursday Adani told police that Amir had asked him to obtain a rabbinical blessing for the assassination. The unidentified rabbi with whom Adani consulted agreed that under Jewish law Rabin could be considered a rodef--someone threatening to kill Jews by his actions--and therefore deserved to be killed, but the rabbi would not authorize such an execution. Since Rabin's assassination, an ultra-Orthodox weekly published a rabbinical ruling allowing Jews to kill acting Prime Minister Shimon Peres.

As Israelis pondered their responsibility for this national tragedy, the deeper causes of Rabin's murder were plain to view. At dawn Monday, Israeli troops drove quietly out of Jenin, a dusty Palestinian city in the northern West Bank, as hundreds of blue-clad Palestinian police marched in to the beat of drums and shouts of welcome. "Now we are free," crowed a young resident as the first West Bank town liberated from occupation under the Oslo II agreement celebrated its independence. "This is what we have waited so long to achieve." What brings this young Palestinian such joy is what has caused Yigal Amir's rage.