Suspect in CIA Slayings Still Eludes Arrest : It’s still a mystery why the gunman shot five people outside agency’s headquarters in Virginia.

WASHINGTON —  More than eight months after five people were shot in broad daylight outside CIA headquarters by a gunman wielding a military-type assault rifle, both the suspected attacker and his motive still elude federal authorities.

Mir Aimal Kansi, 29, a Pakistani national, has been indicted on first-degree murder and malicious wounding charges in the Jan. 25 attack, in which two agency employees were killed while driving to work. Kansi has since drawn FBI agents and other authorities into an international cat-and-mouse game centering in the remote mountains of his native land.

What motivated the accused gunman to commit such a random, violent act has been equally hard for investigators to grasp. Associates have said Kansi seemed angry over U.S. failure to support Muslims in Bosnia, but an FBI official said: “We may not know until we actually get our hands on the guy.”

An attempt to capture Kansi in June fell short. Acting on an FBI tip, Pakistani authorities conducted a pre-dawn raid on several houses owned by his relatives in the western city of Quetta. They arrived in armored personnel carriers and used ladders to scale walls. The operation only succeeded in alienating local leaders.

“This raid went against our tribal laws and traditions,” protested Mohmood Achekzai, a member of Parliament from that region.

Officials believe that Kansi is hiding among wealthy relatives in a “tribal belt” bordering Afghanistan. The area is dominated by the warrior Pashtoon tribes--tough combatants who fought against the British earlier this century and against invading Soviet forces in the last decade. Pakistani authorities, while promising to continue their search for the suspect, fear that additional ill-timed raids could lead to open warfare with these battle-hardened tribes.

The U.S. government recently offered a $100,000 reward for information leading to Kansi’s arrest, and the CIA is working with the FBI and local law officials to locate him. Reward notices and the suspect’s photograph have been posted in Islamabad and other cities.

Pending Kansi’s capture, Pakistan already has started extradition proceedings aimed at returning him to the United States. The Asian nation has extradited several of its citizens, including four drug traffickers, to face U.S. criminal charges.

Kansi entered the United States on a temporary visa in 1990 and later sought political asylum, a request that was not acted upon. Federal agents have linked him to the CIA shooting based on records of his purchase of an AK-47 assault rifle in suburban Virginia, combined with a missing person report filed several days after the shooting by his roommate, Zahed Ahmad Mir, a fellow Pakistani.

Searching the northern Virginia apartment rented by the two men, authorities found the weapon believed used in the attack. They subsequently determined that Kansi had flown to Pakistan the day after the shooting.

Officials also took Mir into custody as a material witness, convinced that he knew more about the crime than he had acknowledged. Mir has since been convicted of falsifying immigration documents in past years to obtain residency and work permits.

The morning rush-hour attack at the CIA perplexed authorities because of its sheer audacity. A suspect matching Kansi’s description suddenly emerged from a light brown station wagon and methodically and wordlessly started shooting into cars as he walked between two lanes of vehicles outside the sprawling complex in suburban Langley, Va.

CIA analyst Frank Darling, 28, was killed as he sat in his blue Volkswagen. Lansing Bennett, 66, a physician employed by the CIA, was slain in his blue Saab 900S, which idled next to Darling’s vehicle. The two had never worked together and were in separate divisions at the agency.

Two other full-time agency employees and an employee of a CIA contractor suffered gunshot wounds and were hospitalized. They have since been released.

The attack was the first of its kind near the fortress-like CIA compound south of the Potomac River, about six miles from downtown Washington, officials said.

As to whether a foreign nation or overseas terrorist group might have sponsored the assault, FBI special agent Frank Scafidi said: “It’s something that everybody has looked at, but nothing has been developed on it so far.”

Steven Emerson, a Washington authority on terrorism, believes the attack bears similarities to the bombing of Manhattan’s World Trade Center in February. Both incidents suggest “a new style of free-lance, religion-inspired terrorism,” says Emerson, which he warns is more unpredictable and harder to prevent than acts sponsored by traditional terrorist groups.