Washington - The FBI worked Friday to establish links between a Saudi-born man, suspected of being part of the al-Qaida terror network, and other terror suspects including alleged "dirty bomb" plotter Jose Padilla.

Adnan G. El Shukrijumah, 27, lived in South Florida at the same time as Padilla, an American being held in a military brig on charges of being an "enemy combatant." Padilla, a former member of a Chicago street gang and a Muslim convert, is suspected of planning to detonate a "dirty bomb" that would have spewed radiological material into the air.

Senior federal law enforcement officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Friday the names of both Padilla and El Shukrijumah - or perhaps one of his half-dozen aliases - surfaced in the intelligence collected after the March 1 capture of senior al-Qaida organizer Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

Mohammed, a member of Osama bin Laden's inner circle, is being interrogated at an undisclosed location overseas.

It was unclear whether El Shukrijumah and Padilla knew each other in Florida or were involved together in the alleged "dirty bomb" plot. FBI officials said they believe El Shukrijumah is an al-Qaida member meant to carry out attacks, rather than a senior planner or financier.

El Shukrijumah's father, Gulshair Muhammad El Shukrijumah, 73, said Friday from his home in Miramar, Fla., that his son was not a terrorist and did not know Padilla. The elder El Shukrijumah said the FBI has visited him six or seven times since the Sept. 11 attacks and interviewed him Thursday for more than an hour.

The son left home two years ago, according to the father, a Muslim missionary who is a spiritual leader in a Miramar mosque. When they last talked five months ago, the son was teaching English in Morocco, El Shukrijumah said.

The FBI is also investigating El Shukrijumah's friendship with Imran Mandhai, one of two Florida college students who pleaded guilty last summer to conspiring to bomb electrical stations, a National Guard armory, Jewish businesses and Mount Rushmore. The elder El Shukrijumah said they knew each other but were never close.

A Florida law enforcement official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said investigators also were looking into a connection between El Shukrijumah and Richard Reid, sentenced in January for attempting to light explosives in his shoes aboard a Paris-to-Miami flight in December 2001.

El Shukrijumah's six known aliases have circulated for months among counterterrorism officials, even appearing on a previous FBI alert. That alert, for a Pakistani named Mohammed Sher Mohammed Khan, included variations on the name Jaffar Al-Tayyar that are identical to those the FBI says are used by El Shukrijumah. In yet another wrinkle, that alias translates roughly from Arabic to English as "Jaffar the pilot," according to Language Analysis Systems, a Herndon, Va., company that specializes in name recognition software for government and businesses. FBI officials said they believed El Shukrijumah had trained as a pilot, but his father denied that.

El Shukrijumah is described as about 5-foot-4 and weighs 132 pounds, although he may be heavier. He has black hair, black eyes and may wear a beard.