NEW YORK, July 19: An Arab-American FBI agent sued the law enforcement agency on Friday charging racial discrimination saying that he was kept out of the investigation of the Sept 11, 2001, hijackings because of his ancestry.

In a front page exclusive report the New York Times said the agent, Bassem Youssef, filed the lawsuit in Federal District Court for the District of Columbia. Youssef, a naturalized American citizen born in Egypt, said in his complaint that “no other non-Arab FBI employee with similar background and experience was wilfully blocked from working 9/11-related matters.”

The Times said that some of the actions against him had broader implications, Mr. Youssef said in his complaint, undermining important counter-terrorism investigations prior to the attacks. “The FBI permitted racism to interfere with national security,” Mr. Youssef said in an earlier filing with the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s equal opportunity office.

In one incident two months before the hijackings, FBI agents in Miami lost a prospective informant of Al Qaeda because of what Mr Youssef said was an internal argument about his involvement in interviews with the source. Whatever information might have been learned was lost, he told the paper.

Stephen M. Kohn, Mr Youssef’s lawyer, who has represented FBI whistleblowers, said that Mr Youssef had risked his career by filing the lawsuit. “Mr Youssef has placed his career in jeopardy in order to ensure that the FBI can properly protect the public against another terrorist attack,” Mr. Kohn told the paper. “FBI discrimination against middle easterners is not only un-American, it also undermines the war on terrorism.”

A spokesman for FBI told NYT he could not discuss the charges. “We have received a complaint and the matter is being investigated,” the spokesman said.

In his complaint, Mr. Youssef said that a “glass ceiling” existed at the bureau that blocked the advancement of Arab-Americans. The charges come at a time when the FBI is trying to hire Arab-American agents, analysts and translators to help the bureau reshape itself into a counter-terrorism agency to respond to international threats the paper said.