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New York - A 26-year-old American-born Long Island man who traveled to Pakistan and trained in a Qaeda camp there last year has been charged with taking part in a rocket attack against a United States base in Afghanistan, according to court papers unsealed on Wednesday.

The man, Bryant Neal Vinas, who was arrested in Peshawar, Pakistan, last November, was also charged with assisting Al Qaeda by providing “expert advice and assistance” that was “derived from specialized knowledge of the New York transit system and the Long Island Rail Road, communications equipment and personnel,” according to the papers.

The court papers, a criminal information charging Mr. Vinas with conspiracy and carrying out the attempted missile attack, providing material support to Al Qaeda and receiving military support from the group, did not mention a specific New York City plot involving the Long Island Rail Road. The papers, filed by prosecutors in the office of the Brooklyn United States attorney, Benton J. Campbell, also say that he attempted the attack and received “military-type training” from and on behalf of Al Qaeda between March and August 2008.

But around the time of his arrest in Pakistan in November, the federal authorities in New York issued warnings about a possible attack on mass transit. One official said that the information about the possible attack, which the authorities described at the time as “aspirational,” came from a Long Island man who had been arrested in Pakistan.

The criminal information charges that Mr. Vinas, along with other people who were not named, “fired rockets at a United States military base in Afghanistan” in September 2008.

The name of Mr. Vinas’s lawyer could not be immediately determined. Mr. Vinas, who converted to Islam at a mosque on Long Island, where he worked briefly as a truck driver and in a car wash, has been cooperating with European and United States counterterrorism officials since some time after his arrest, according to European and American officials. The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the case, said he was a key witness in two terrorism prosecutions in Europe.

The cases there, in Belgium and Italy, center on two groups of French and Belgian nationals, several of whom trained in the camps, as well as on a Moroccan-born woman, Malika El Aroud, who has been accused of using the Internet to recruit the young Muslim men to train with Al Qaeda in Pakistan.

Mr. Vinas, according to European officials, is expected to be a key witness in those attacks because he spent time in the training camps with the men, who officials have said were recruited through Ms. El Aroud’s Web site.

Ms. El Aroud, a Belgian citizen, has become one of the most prominent Internet jihadists in Europe, writing in French under the name Oum Obeyda. She began her rise to prominence as the widow of a suicide bomber. Her husband killed the anti-Taliban resistance leader Ahmed Shah Massoud two days before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks at the behest of Osama bin Laden.