NEW YORK One man was a food cart vendor from Afghanistan, arrested during an argument with a parking enforcement officer over a ticket. Another was an Egyptian-born limousine driver, picked up in a prostitution sting. Still another was an accounting student from Pakistan, in custody for driving without a valid license.

The men, all Muslim immigrants, went through similar ordeals: waiting in a New York stationhouse cell or a lockup facility, expecting to be arraigned, only to be pulled aside and questioned by detectives. The queries were not about the charges against them, but about where they went to mosque and what their prayer habits were. Eventually, the detectives got to the point: Would they work for the police, eavesdropping in Muslim cafes and restaurants, or in mosques?

Beginning a few years after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, a squad of detectives, known as the Citywide Debriefing Team, has combed the city's jails for immigrants - predominantly Muslims - who might be persuaded to become police informants, according to documents obtained by The New York Times, along with interviews with former members of the unit and senior police officials.

Last month, the Police Department announced it had disbanded a controversial surveillance unit that had sent plainclothes detectives into Muslim communities to listen in on conversations and build detailed files on where people ate, prayed and shopped. But the continuing work of the debriefing team shows that the department has not backed away from other counterterrorism initiatives that it created in the years after the Sept. 11 attacks.

In the first quarter of this year, according to police officials, the team conducted 220 interviews.

The Times reviewed two dozen reports generated by the debriefing team in early 2009. Together, the documents and the interviews offered an up-close view at how the squad operates, functioning as a recruiter for the Intelligence Division, the arm of the department that is dedicated to foiling terrorist plots. But they also showed that the division's counterterrorism mission had come to intersect in some new - and potentially uncomfortable - ways with the department's more traditional crime-fighting work.

They showed that religion had become a normal topic of police inquiry in the city's holding cells and lockup facilities. Some reports written by detectives after debriefing sessions noted whether a prisoner attended mosque, celebrated Muslim holidays or had made a pilgrimage to Mecca.

The report on the food cart vendor, Bayjan Abrahimi, 31, described the location of his mosque in Queens and noted that worshippers were a "mix of Afghani, Persian (Iranians) and Pakistani." The Egyptian limousine driver said he "considers himself to be a Sunni Muslim" but "has not prayed at a Mosque in quite some time," according to the report.

Police officials described the debriefing team's interviews as "conversations," as opposed to interrogations. But many of those interviewed said that as Muslim immigrants in a post-9/11 world, they felt they had little choice but to cooperate.

The limousine driver, Moro Said, 57, said he was driving in the Flushing section of Queens when he pulled over because he thought a woman needed directions. The woman was an undercover police officer, and Said was arrested and brought to central booking in Queens.

Said expected to be brought before a judge, when officers led him out of a holding cell. He found himself in a small room, where a police officer offered to make his case go away.

"If you can help us, everything will be OK," Said recalled the man as saying. When Said asked what was wanted in return, "He says, 'You just go to the mosque and the cafe and just say to us if somebody is talking about anything, anything suspicious.' "

Said said he found it coercive that they would ask him to become an informant while he was in custody. While he was waiting, Said said an Afghan prisoner was also taken out and interviewed by the same investigator.

"It's not appropriate," said Said. "They're fishing. You're in trouble with the law and they are the law." He said that by agreeing to do some of what the investigator asked him to do, he was simply trying to placate the police, "because I'm in a situation and they can make it bigger, believe me, they can make it bigger."

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Said said that when a detective called him about a week later to schedule a meeting, he declined, and "then I hang up."

"I don't want to be a spy on anybody," Said said in a phone interview. "I hate spying."