NEW YORK (AP) – Doctors who volunteer to work under a terrorist organization’s direction to treat the wounds of terrorists can be prosecuted under federal terrorism laws, a judge said Tuesday in the case of a Florida doctor accused of pledging to treat Al Qaeda members.

U.S. District Judge Loretta A. Preska put her decision in writing because she said it was a question of first impression for the courts when defendant Dr. Rafiq Abdus Sabir claimed it was unconstitutional to prosecute a doctor for providing medical services.

Dr. Sabir, an Ivy League-educated doctor, was arrested in May 2005 at his home in a gated community in Boca Raton, Fla., accused in a plot to assist terrorist organizations along with a New York jazz musician, a Brooklyn bookstore owner and a Maryland man who once worked as a Washington, D.C., cab driver. He has pleaded not guilty and remained jailed since his arrest.

Dr. Sabir was charged with conspiring to provide material support or resources to a terrorist organization from October 2003 through May 2005 by providing and trying to provide medical support to wounded terrorists, knowing that al-Qaida engages in terrorist activity.

Though the judge ruled against Dr. Sabir’s motions to dismiss the indictment at a pretrial hearing on Jan. 17, she explained Tuesday the reasoning behind her decision to reject his argument that it would be unconstitutional to prosecute him for carrying out his medical duties.

She said “any reasonable doctor” would know from the plain language of federal law on the subject that pledging to provide medical support to wounded terrorist under the control and direction of Al Qaeda would be a form of outlawed “expert advice or assistance.”

“It is not beyond the power of Congress to prohibit the provision of medical services by a doctor working under the control or direction of a terrorist organization,” the judge wrote.

The judge said Dr. Sabir is not charged merely for being a doctor or for performing medical services.

“Here, Sabir is alleged essentially to have volunteered as a medic for the al-Qaida military, offering to make himself available specifically to attend to the wounds of injured fighters,” she said. “Much as a military force needs weapons, ammunition, trucks, food and shelter, it needs medical personnel to tend to its wounded.”

She also rejected arguments by Dr. Sabir’s lawyer, Edward Wilford, that the law on the subject was unconstitutionally vague because it would subject to prosecution doctors who treat a terrorist randomly at a hospital or members of a group like Doctors Without Borders.

In both examples, a reasonable doctor would understand that he or she could not be subject to prosecution, the judge said.

Neither the doctor at a hospital who treats a terrorist by random chance or a doctor in a nongovernment organization is acting under the direction or control of a designated foreign terrorist organization, she said.

She noted that even prosecutors conceded that doctors in those hypotheticals would not face prosecution.

She said Dr. Sabir had failed to show that an anti-terrorism law passed in 1996 reaches “any, let alone a substantial amount of, constitutionally protected conduct.”

Mr. Wilford did not immediately return a telephone message for comment Tuesday.