Sun Nov 17, 8:27 AM ET

KUWAIT (Reuters) - Kuwait has foiled a plot to bomb a hotel housing U.S. citizens in Yemen after arresting a senior al Qaeda member who had been helping plan the attack, Kuwaiti security sources said Sunday.

But the sources said the arrested man, a 21-year-old Kuwaiti identified only as Mohsen F, was not the top al Qaeda leader who Washington says was captured recently and is now in U.S. custody.

Kuwaiti newspapers reported Sunday that Mohsen headed Osama bin Laden (news - web sites)'s al Qaeda operations in the Arabian Peninsula and had identified those behind last month's attack against a French supertanker off Yemen.

"The reports are correct," said a Kuwaiti Interior Ministry official. He declined to give further details.

The security sources said Mohsen had been arrested within the last two weeks and that during interrogation he had provided details of a planned car bomb attack on the hotel in Yemen.

They said he had also given information about the October 6 attack which gutted the Limburg tanker and killed one crewman. The information included the names of two men who allegedly planned the attack.

One of the men named by Mohsen was also allegedly involved in the 2000 suicide bombing of the U.S. warship Cole in Aden harbor that killed 17 U.S. sailors, security sources said.

The newspapers quoted officials as saying that Kuwaiti authorities had passed information obtained from Mohsen to the United States, France and Saudi Arabia, helping prevent the planned hotel bombing, which was to have been carried out with a car packed with explosives.

The security sources said Mohsen had confessed to collecting $127,000 to finance the hotel attack. They said Mohsen had fought in Chechnya (news - web sites) and with the Taliban in Afghanistan (news - web sites).

Yemen is the ancestral home of Saudi-born fugitive bin Laden. Six al Qaeda members were killed in Yemen in a rocket attack by a CIA (news - web sites) drone plane earlier this month.

U.S. government sources said Friday that one of the top two-dozen al Qaeda leaders had been captured recently and was in U.S. custody. They declined to name him but said he was not top lieutenant Ayman al-Zawahri, operational leader Khalid Shaikh Mohammed or bin Laden's son Saad.

Kuwaiti officials said the man in U.S. custody was not Mohsen.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation said in a bulletin dated Thursday that al Qaeda may be plotting "spectacular" attacks that could cause mass casualties and severe damage to the U.S. economy.

-- Anonymous, November 17, 2002