The most significant terrorism trial to take place in America since the September 11, 2001, attacks is set to open today in federal court in Tampa, Fla.

A former professor at the University of South Florida, Sami Al-Arian, and three other men face charges that they operated the American wing of a terrorist group, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, that has taken responsibility for dozens of bombings in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank.

All of the defendants have pleaded not guilty. While jury selection is scheduled to get underway this morning, there is still considerable uncertainty about where the trial will take place.

“It’s time for it to be over, one way or the other, and, hopefully, justice will be done,” a retired Immigration and Naturalization Service agent who worked on the investigation, William West, said in an interview. “I think this one’s a critically important case to get resolved.”

Mr. Al-Arian and at least one of his codefendants have asked the judge presiding over the case, James Moody Jr., to move the trial to another city because of intense publicity. Judge Moody has made no decision on such a move, which the government opposes. However, the judge disclosed last week that he has begun looking into other venues for the trial, such as Alexandria, Va., or Jacksonville, Fla., if a fair jury cannot be impaneled in Tampa.

Mr. Al-Arian’s saga has dominated the headlines in Tampa for nearly a decade. In November 1994, a PBS documentary accused Mr. Al-Arian, an engineering professor, of sponsoring conferences in America where Islamic radicals advocated violence. Six months later, the Tampa Tribune published a series of reports detailing Mr. Al-Arian’s involvement with two groups that have alleged ties to terrorists, the Islamic Committee for Palestine and the World and Islam Enterprise.

Mr. Al-Arian denied the assertions, but the stories drew the attention of federal investigators. More fuel was added to the fire after an adjunct professor who worked closely with Mr. Al-Arian abruptly quit – and soon surfaced in Syria, declaring himself the new leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

After passage of the Patriot Act in 2001, the government investigation intensified. The law removed a barrier that prevented most of the criminal investigators on the case from communicating with intelligence agents who were probing Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s ties in America. In February 2003, an indictment was handed up, charging Mr. Al-Arian and seven others with being part of a racketeering conspiracy to commit murder overseas. The defendants also face charges of providing material support to a terrorist group, violating financial sanctions, extortion, and immigration fraud.

Mr. Al-Arian and another defendant, Sameeh Hammoudeh, have been in custody since they were arrested more than two years ago.

“Having been detained for almost two years, they’re anxious it’s finally going to start,” an attorney for Mr. Hammoudeh, Stephen Crawford, said.

Mr. Al-Arian’s lawyers did not respond to messages seeking comment for this article. Two other defendants, Ghassan Ballut and Hatim Fariz, are free on bail. Federal authorities have not been able to arrest the remaining defendants, including Mr. Al-Arian’s brother-in-law, Mazen Al-Najjar.

Yesterday, a lawyer for Mr. Ballut filed a five-page list of possible witnesses in the case. Among them is a Columbia professor who directs the university’s center for Middle East studies, Rashid Khalidi.

Neither Mr. Khalidi nor Mr. Ballut’s attorney, Bruce Howie, returned calls seeking comment for this story.

While much of the evidence in the case remains secret, The New York Sun has obtained hundreds of pages of heavily redacted FBI documents from the early days of the decade-long investigation.

The records show that the FBI concluded long ago that Mr. Al-Arian was a member of the senior leadership of Palestinian Islamic Jihad. “Sami Amin Al-Arian is a member of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad Consultative Council,” an unnamed Tampa FBI agent wrote in a “case narrative” on September 16, 1996.

Agents also complained about press coverage of the government’s efforts to deport Mr. Al-Arian’s brother-in-law, Mr. Al-Najjar. In a June 30, 1997, memo to officials at FBI headquarters, an agent wrote that an ally of Mr. Al-Najjar “has co-opted one local media, the St. Petersburg Times newspaper.” The agent also predicted that the supporter of Mr. Al-Najjar, apparently Mr. Al-Arian, “will muster legal and media support from his liberal political contacts.”

In an interview, the president and editor of the St. Petersburg Times, Paul Tash, denied that his newspaper was unduly influenced by Mr. Al-Arian or his friends. “We haven’t been in the tank for either the cops or the crooks,” Mr. Tash said. “We’ve very much tried to play it straight, and we’ll continue to do so.”

Mr. West, the former immigration agent, said agents on the case sometimes had discussions about the “slant” of various stories about the investigation. “To find that the bureau actually put something like that in writing surprises me,” he said. “That’s the first I’m hearing about it.”

The lead producer of the 1994 PBS documentary, Steven Emerson, said the St. Petersburg newspaper was duped by Mr. Al-Arian. “For years, the St. Petersburg Times effectively became the no.1 de facto public relations arm of Al-Arian in its long and shameful record of now demonstrably inaccurate reporting,” he said yesterday.

The FBI records were released by the Justice Department in February, in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit Mr. Al-Najjar filed in 2000 about the use of classified evidence in his deportation proceeding. Most names and other details were removed from the copies that were released.

In August 2002, Mr. Al-Najjar was deported from America to Lebanon. According to press reports, the Lebanese government later deported him to Iran.

A lawyer for Mr. Al-Najjar, Steven Schulman, said he doesn’t believe his client, who is now the subject of an arrest warrant, has seen the documents that the government made public in response to his request and lawsuit.

“I literally have no idea where he is,” Mr. Schulman said. “For similar reasons, we haven’t been spending much time on the case.”

Prosecutors and defense attorneys have filed with the court questions they want the judge to ask prospective jurors during the jury selection expected to begin today. One question proposed by the government makes three references to “the conflict between Israel and some Palestinian people” and asks jurors whether they can set aside their opinions on that subject.

In a motion filed yesterday, a lawyer for Mr. Fariz objected to the prosecutors’ terminology. “The government’s characterization of the conflict as one between Israel and some Palestinian people is both inflammatory and inaccurate,” wrote the defense attorney, Kevin Beck.

Lawyers for the press are also sparring with Judge Moody over an order he issued last week prohibiting identification and even sketching of jurors in the case. He has scheduled a hearing today on the issue.

The government has said it would prefer a further delay in the trial to a change of venue. One potential complication is that not all defendants have joined in the change-of-venue request. Under the Constitution, the judge cannot force a change of venue on defendants who do not consent to it.

“If you insist on being tried in the particular state and district where the alleged crime was committed, that’s your Sixth Amendment right,” a law professor at Fordham, Bruce Green, said. “One possibility, of course, is to sever the case.”

Mr. Crawford, one of the defense attorneys, said sometimes, in a multi-defendant case, one defendant will attempt to cause logistical problems for the prosecution by objecting to the change of venue. “It kind of puts the court in a dilemma,” he said.