ALEXANDRIA, Va. – Lawyers for a former Army scientist suing The New York Times for libel said an editor at the paper warned columnist Nicholas Kristof to remove incriminating passages from a column that raised suspicions about Steven Hatfill’s role in the 2001 anthrax attacks.

Kristof left the passages in the May 2002 column despite the warning, lawyers for Mr. Hatfill said Friday. Hatfill claims that a series of Kristof columns that year falsely implicated him as the culprit in the anthrax mailings that left five people dead.

The editor’s warning to Mr. Kristof was voiced in an e-mail that was uncovered during the extensive pretrial discovery process, said Mark Grannis, one of Hatfill’s lawyers.

The accusation came as a federal judge again heard arguments on whether to dismiss the lawsuit. The newspaper’s lawyers argued that under federal libel law, Hatfill should be considered a public figure. The law makes it more difficult for public figures to prevail in libel cases.

Hatfill’s lawyers dispute that their client should be classified as a public figure. But even if he were, they said, they have uncovered numerous flaws in Mr. Kristof’s reporting that are so flagrant that Hatfill would win his case even if forced to proceed as a public figure.

Grannis said that in addition to the editor’s warning, several of Kristof’s sources testified in pretrial depositions that they did not provide information to Kristof as the columnist claims.

“Mr. Kristof made things up,” Mr. Grannis said. “What Mr. Kristof reported was not just false, it was embarrassingly false. It was outrageously false.”

Times spokeswoman Abbe Serphos said only that the column itself should not be a part of the lawsuit because the statute of limitations had expired.

Mr. Kristof’s columns initially referred to Mr. Hatfill only as “Mr. Z”; Hatfill was identified by name only after he held a news conference in August 2002 to denounce rumors that had been swirling around him.

Mr. Kristof has said his purpose in writing the columns was to prod a dawdling FBI investigation and that he explicitly said in several columns that Mr. Z enjoys a legal presumption of innocence.

Mr. Hatfill claims that Kristof’s columns revealed enough details for people to figure out who he was despite withholding his name.

Times lawyer Lee Levine said Hatfill is being hypocritical when he argues that he is not a public figure. On the one hand, Mr. Hatfill contends he was so well known that people could piece together his identity from the clues in Kristof’s “Mr. Z” columns. On the other hand, they argue that he was essentially an unknown when it comes to his status as a public figure under libel law.

“You can’t have it both ways,” Mr. Levine said.

Even though Mr. Hatfill was not a household name, Mr. Levine said he qualifies as a public figure because he had injected himself prominently into the national debate about bioterrorism years before the anthrax attacks. He had occasionally been quoted as an expert in the mass media, and even once donned a chemical suit for a magazine photo.

“He’s in that photo wearing a biohazard suit standing in a kitchen cooking up the plague,” Mr. Levine said, citing the photo caption. “He voluntarily thrust himself into the vortex of the controversy about national preparedness for terrorist attacks.”

U.S. District Judge Claude Hilton said he will rule on the newspaper’s motion soon. The trial is scheduled to begin Jan. 29.

Judge Hilton previously ordered Kristof to disclose his confidential FBI sources so Mr. Hatfill could pursue his claim. Mr. Kristof refused, and in response Judge Hilton barred Mr. Kristof from relying on any information provided by those sources in his defense.

Mr. Hatfill’s lawsuit was initially dismissed in 2004 by Judge Hilton, who ruled that Kristof’s columns were merely an accurate reflection of the status of the FBI’s investigation at the time.

But in a split ruling, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., disagreed and reinstated the lawsuit. The appellate court ruled that, as a whole, Kristof’s columns could lead a reasonable reader to conclude that Hatfill was the anthrax killer.

None of the appellate rulings touched on the issue of whether Hatfill should be considered a public figure.

Mr. Hatfill is also suing former Attorney General John Ashcroft, the Justice Department and others in U.S. District Court in Washington, claiming they violated Mr. Hatfill’s civil rights.