A San Diego stock adviser who is accused of bribing an F.B.I. agent to give him confidential government information may have had prior knowledge of the Sept. 11 attacks, a federal prosecutor said yesterday. But a judge disregarded that contention and the adviser's lawyer called the allegation ludicrous.


Mr. Breen, coordinator of the stock market unit of a government task force set up to investigate financing for terrorist groups, offered no other evidence that Mr. Elgindy had prior knowledge of the attacks.

A lawyer for Mr. Elgindy said the allegation appeared to be motivated by the fact that Mr. Elgindy is Muslim and was born in Egypt. Senior F.B.I. officials also said they had no evidence that Mr. Elgindy had prior knowledge of the attacks.

In the hearing yesterday, Mr. Breen asked Judge John A. Houston of Federal District Court in San Diego to hold Mr. Elgindy without bond. Mr. Elgindy, also known as Tony Elgindy and Anthony Pacific, recently moved $700,000 to Lebanon and is a serious flight risk, Mr. Breen said.

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Judge Houston disregarded Mr. Breen's claims about Mr. Elgindy and Sept. 11. But the judge said there was enough other evidence that Mr. Elgindy might flee to justify detaining him at least until a June 6 hearing to determine whether he should be moved to New York for a trial.

Jeanne Geren Knight, a lawyer for Mr. Elgindy, said after the hearing that Mr. Breen's allegations were ludicrous and untrue. ''The government, for lack of factual evidence, has decided to smear my client with terrorist innuendoes,'' Ms. Knight said. ''This is smacking of racial profiling.''

Mr. Elgindy and four other people, including one current and one former F.B.I. agent, were charged Wednesday with using confidential government information to manipulate stock prices and extort money from companies. Jeffrey A. Royer, who was an F.B.I. agent before joining Mr. Elgindy's stock advisory firm in December, accepted $30,000 from a partner of Mr. Elgindy's in exchange for providing Mr. Elgindy with information about current criminal investigations of companies, prosecutors allege.

Mr. Elgindy and his partner, Derrick W. Cleveland, sold short the shares of companies that they learned were under investigation, according to the indictment. (Short sellers borrow shares and sell them, hoping to buy them back later at a lower price and pocket the difference.) Then Mr. Elgindy publicized the negative information on two Web sites he ran, hoping that the companies' stocks would fall, prosecutors say.

At the hearing yesterday, Mr. Breen said that on the afternoon of Sept. 10, Mr. Elgindy contacted his broker at Salomon Smith Barney and asked him to sell $300,000 in stock in his children's trust funds. During the Sept. 10 conversation, Mr. Elgindy predicted that the Dow Jones industrial average, which at the time stood at about 9,600, would soon crash to below 3,000, Mr. Breen said. Mr. Elgindy was unable to sell the stock before markets closed Sept. 10, and it was instead sold Sept. 18, the first day that markets reopened for trading after the attacks, Mr. Breen said.

The Salomon Smith Barney broker contacted the F.B.I. after the attacks to report the conversation, Mr. Breen said. He did not identify the broker. A spokesman for Salomon Smith Barney confirmed that Mr. Elgindy was a client but said that Salomon did not comment on matters relating to its clients.

Mr. Elgindy also transferred more than $700,000 to Lebanon in the months after the attacks, Mr. Breen said. When F.B.I. agents raided Mr. Elgindy's home outside San Diego on Wednesday, Mr. Breen said, they found $43,000 in cash, as well as a loose diamond and faxes indicating that Mr. Elgindy had been tipped about the raid and had given his wife a power of attorney to liquidate his assets.

Ms. Knight, Mr. Elgindy's lawyer, denied that Mr. Elgindy had any prior knowledge of the attacks.

Mr. Elgindy's wife is from Louisiana, Ms. Knight said, adding that his mother was a pediatrician and his father a professor. ''Tony isn't political at all,'' she said. ''He's a capitalist. He's not going to move to a third world country.''

Senior law enforcement officials said yesterday that investigators had no hard evidence that Mr. Elgindy had advance information about the Sept. 11 attacks. So far, they have not found anyone who had prior knowledge of the attacks, they said. But they said the investigation into why Mr. Elgindy tried to sell the shares in his children's trust accounts before Sept. 11 had raised questions that had not been fully answered.

Mr. Elgindy has been an active supporter of Muslim causes. In 1999, he arranged to bring 30 Muslim refugees from Kosovo to the United States, according to The Daily Herald of Chicago.

Mr. Elgindy said the violence in Kosovo, Serbia's southern province, appalled him, comparing it to the shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado. ''Take Columbine, have it occur five times a day for a year, and that's Kosovo,'' Mr. Elgindy told The Daily Herald.

Mr. Elgindy's father and brother are also active in Arab and Muslim causes. His father, Ibrahim Elgindy, founded an umbrella group of Muslim organizations in Chicago and led a 1998 protest on behalf of Muhammad A. Salah, whose assets were seized that year after the United States government linked Mr. Salah to Hamas, the radical Palestinian group. Mr. Elgindy's brother, Khaled, has worked for several Arab political groups.

Neither Ibrahim Elgindy nor Khaled Elgindy has ever been linked to terrorism. Khaled Elgindy did not return calls yesterday. Ibrahim Elgindy could not be reached for comment.

Mr. Elgindy himself publicly criticized the Sept. 11 attacks. In a press release that day, his company, Pacific Equity Investigations, said, ''We must seek, find, apprehend and destroy those who are responsible for this terrorist attack.''

Two days later, Mr. Elgindy put out another press release, saying that he had forwarded to the F.B.I. and the Securities and Exchange Commission ''many Internet posts and messages that may have relevance on this tragedy and the capture of the responsible parties behind it.'' He also asked that investors refrain from selling short the stocks of any United States companies or the United States dollar.

Mr. Elgindy sold the shares in his children's trusts five days later.

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