member of Al Qaeda who was involved in plans to blow up the United States Embassy in Singapore is providing federal authorities with important new details about that plot and other aspects of the Qaeda terrorist group's operations, law enforcement officials said yesterday.
The Qaeda operative, Mohamed Mansur Jabarah, is being questioned by members of the F.B.I.-N.Y.P.D. Joint Terrorist Task Force at a military base in the northeastern United States. The officials said Mr. Jabarah had been one of the most cooperative of the Qaeda members detained since the Sept. 11 attacks and was likely to testify at trials of Qaeda suspects.
They said Mr. Jabarah, a Canadian citizen, had also provided information about how the group's terrorists were trained in Afghanistan and how they masked their identities while living in other countries. One official said some of this could help the authorities ferret out other Qaeda operatives.
Last December, the police in Singapore arrested what they described as 13 Qaeda members who were part of a cell that had prepared to blow up embassies of the United States, Israel, Britain and Australia. The plot was thwarted, but American authorities have said it was a serious effort with support from Qaeda leaders.
The officials said Mr. Jabarah, who is in his 20's, escaped to Oman, where he was caught and interrogated. He was then returned to Canada, where intelligence officials arranged for him to be sent to the United States.
Investigators said he was now being held on a material witness warrant and could later be charged in connection with the Singapore plot.
While the authorities have had to deal with a significant amount of disinformation in questioning other captured Qaeda members, one official said that "significant amounts of his stuff have been corroborated."
As a result, one official said, Mr. Jabarah has been granted some perquisites, like cooking some of his own meals in accordance with Islamic customs.
NBC News reported last night that Mr. Jabarah had instructed the other Singapore plotters in the use of explosives. The plot was unnerving, federal authorities said, because it represented a classic example of the kind of "sleeper" cells that Al Qaeda likes to establish.
Investigators in Singapore have said that the group there took root as early as 1993. Its members lead outwardly normal lives and were eventually organized into cells, at least three groups of four or five men each devoted to planning attacks.
Singapore police have said that two foreigners, known to members of the group only as Mike and Sammy, arrived to activate the cell that was plotting to bomb the embassy there after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Fathur Rahman al-Ghozi, the man known as Mike, was arrested in January. One Western official said yesterday that Mr. Jabarah was the man known as Sammy.
Singapore police became aware of the plot last fall and began making arrests on Dec. 9. A few days later, a videotape was found in an abandoned house in Kabul, Afghanistan, on which a narrator described where bombs could be hidden in Singapore to attack Americans.
Investigators in Singapore searched the homes of those detained and found an identical videotape. Authorities in the Philippines later seized rifles, explosives and bombmaking equipment believed to have been part of the plot.