INVESTIGATORS DREAD PROSPECT THAT CHURCH FIRES ARE EPIDEMIC.

Byline: Michael J. Sniffen Associated Press 

Federal investigators probing a surge in African-American church fires fear they may confront a foe more dangerous and harder to stop than a national conspiracy: an epidemic of individuals or tiny groups acting separately out of racial hatred.

``The prospect of a conspiracy is a chilling thing,'' Assistant Attorney General Deval L. Patrick, co-chair of the fires task force, said in an interview. ``But the prospect that these are separate acts of racism is even worse.''

Not only would the legal cases be ``harder to prove and more work,'' but ``an epidemic of individual terrorists . . . is tougher as a social problem,'' said Patrick, who heads the Justice Department's civil rights division.

As one Treasury agent on the case said, ``Conspiracies are easier to crack because it's harder for two people than one to keep a secret. We spent 18 years chasing the Unabomber and ended up charging a total loner.''

But conspiracy hasn't been ruled out. Some small ones have been uncovered and convictions won - each in a different locality.

For the first time, the federal task force is merging computer files on 216 attacks since May 1990 on white churches, African-American churches, synagogues and mosques so they can be searched for patterns.

``We have been trying to investigate the possibility of links within small numbers of cases or across regions or even nationally,'' Patrick said. Combining these FBI and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms files ``gives us another perspective on that question.''

And, after two weeks of intense publicity and stepped up investigations:

Federal civil rights charges are not far off in a South Carolina case where two Ku Klux Klan members have been charged locally in two African-American church fires a year ago.

More FBI and ATF agents and civil rights prosecutors are soon to be added with $21.5 million in extra funding for what is already the largest federal arson investigation in history. Nearly 250 federal agents are at work with an equal number of state troopers and local policemen.

More than 800 citizen tips have come into a toll-free federal hotline - ``some very useful and some nutty ones,'' according to one federal agent.

The first systematic prevention efforts have begun: volunteer church-sitters, new locks and lights on churches and more frequent police patrols.

This activity is in response to a surge in attacks on churches since January 1995, particularly fires in African-American churches in the Southeast.

More than 55 percent of the 216 church attacks investigated by federal agents since 1990 came in the past 18 months - two-thirds of the recent ones in the Southeast.

And 56 percent of the recent attacks targeted African-American churches even though there are far more white churches.