A Bronx man has filed a lawsuit claiming that he was taunted and falsely arrested by police officers after they learned that he had the same name as a West African immigrant shot to death by other officers in 1999.

Amadou Diallo said he was parking his car in Harlem in February when a group of officers confronted him over a broken headlight, and then searched his vehicle for weapons.

Once the officers learned his name, Diallo's lawyer said in the suit, it became "a source of much amusement, laughing and inappropriate joking amongst the officers, with crude and disgusting comments.""Oh, you're back from the dead," one of the officers told Diallo, the suit claimed.

Amadou Diallo was also the name of an unarmed immigrant killed in 1999 when four plain-clothed police officers, apparently mistakenly thinking he was reaching for a gun, fired 41 rounds in the doorway of a Bronx apartment building. The killing prompted large street protests, which were echoed on a smaller scale in recent weeks as activists expressed outrage over a similar shooting involving Sean Bell, a groom-to-be who was killed as he left his bachelor party.

The new Diallo lawsuit, filed in federal court in Manhattan, said he was arrested and charged with possessing a knife, but those charges were dropped by prosecutors within 24 hours. Diallo's lawyer said no knife was ever found.

A spokeswoman for the city's law department declined to comment on the suit.