WASHINGTON, Nov. 22 - Jose Padilla, an American citizen held without charge for more than three years as an enemy combatant, has been indicted in what the federal authorities said today was a plot to "murder, kidnap and maim" people overseas.

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Video | Indictment | Background

This undated photograph of Jose Padilla is from the Florida Department of Motor Vehicles.
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who announced the indictment here, said that Mr. Padilla had traveled abroad to become "a violent jihadist" and that he had conspired to send "money, physical assets and new recruits" overseas to engage in acts of terrorism.

Almost from the moment his arrest was announced in 2002, Mr. Padilla has been at the center of a debate over the proper balance between national security and personal liberties, especially in an age of terrorism and shadowy forces that neither serve nor operate under the conventions of nation-states.

The government"s announcement of a criminal indictment of Mr. Padilla today marked a significant shift in its public position on certain people seized as "enemy combatants" in the campaign against terrorism.

The Bush administration position that it has the right to hold Mr. Padilla without formal charges as an enemy combatant, despite his citizenship, was upheld two months ago by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Richmond, which threw out a lower court ruling to the contrary.

But some lawyers continued to insist that keeping an American citizen in a Navy brig with limited access to legal counsel was a violation of civil rights and the spirit of the Constitution.

Scott Silliman, a Duke University law professor, who specializes in national security, theorized that the government had secured the indictment against Mr. Padilla so that it could sidestep a Supreme Court showdown over when and for how long American citizens could be held in military prisons.

"That"s an issue the administration did not want to face," Mr. Silliman told The Associated Press.

Attorney General Gonzales said Mr. Padilla would soon be transferred from the Navy brig in South Carolina, where he has been held for three years, to federal custody in Florida for a trial that is expected to begin in about a year.

The indictment, which was returned by a federal grand jury in Miami, said that Mr. Padilla had traveled overseas as far back as July 1998 to plot with four co-defendants, also named, and in July 2000 sought to join a terrorist camp. The others named in the indictment are Adham Amin Hassoun, Mohammed Hesham Youssef, Kifah Wael Jayyousi and Kassem Daher.

Mr. Padilla, a Brooklyn-born convert to Islam who is in his mid-30"s, faces life in prison if he is convicted.

The formal charges against Mr. Padilla are the latest development in a case that has been controversial from its very beginning, when he was arrested in 2002 at Chicago"s O"Hare airport on his return from Pakistan, and that promises to remain controversial.

The attorney general at the time, John Ashcroft, announced with considerable fanfare that Mr. Padilla, a former Chicago gang member, had hoped to set off a radiological "dirty bomb" and carry out attacks against hotels and apartment buildings in the United States. The government said he had been trained by Al Qaeda.

Although today Mr. Gonzales described Mr. Padilla as a violent jihadist, there was no mention of the earlier "dirty bomb" accusation, which was never the subject of formal charges. Nor was there a mention in the indictment of any violence that Mr. Padilla had hoped to wreak in the United States.

Asked by a reporter today if the "dirty bomb" accusations against Mr. Padilla were now "off the table," Mr. Gonzales declined to comment.

"There are limits to what I can say outside the indictment," he said. He also declined to talk about Mr. Padilla"s original designation as an enemy combatant, under which he had been held in the brig without formal charges.

At his news briefing here, Mr. Gonzales credited the USA Patriot Act with helping to make the prosecution of Mr. Padilla possible.

Passed by Congress shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, the act broadened government surveillance powers. Mr. Gonzales said the measure had been effective at "tearing down the artificial wall" that had impeded information-sharing among certain law-enforcement agencies.

Asked whether the indictment might have been timed to bolster support for the Patriot Act, which is being debated in Congress as some of its provisions are up for renewal, Mr. Gonzales replied, "Absolutely not."