NEW YORK (AP) – An Afghan drug lord who made a U.S. most wanted list and a personal fortune by forging an alliance with the Taliban was arrested while traveling to the United States, federal authorities said Monday.

Bashir Noorzai was ordered held without bail at his initial court appearance in Manhattan on charges he tried to smuggle 500 kilograms of heroin with a value of more than $50 million into the United States. If convicted, he could face a maximum sentence of life in prison.

The full circumstances of Noorzai’s capture were not made public. Assistant U.S. Attorney Boyd Johnson told a judge that Drug Enforcement Administration agents arrested the defendant at about 12:30 p.m. Saturday in New York, but he did not elaborate.

Noorzai, 44, wearing a full beard and a dark blue polo shirt, remained silent during the brief hearing. He was given a court-appointed attorney after signing an affidavit claiming he had no assets, and his arraignment was scheduled for Wednesday.

His attorney, David Greenfield, declined to comment outside court.

Noorzai, identified last year by President Bush as one of the world’s most wanted drug kingpins, had “a symbiotic relationship” with the Taliban, U.S. Attorney David Kelley said at a news conference.

An indictment alleges that between 1990 and 2004 the defendant and his organization “provided demolitions, weapons and manpower to the Taliban,” Kelly said. “In exchange, the Taliban allowed Noorzai’s business to flourish.”

The Taliban protected Noorzai’s opium crops, its heroin laboratories in Afghanistan and Pakistan and its drug transportation routes out of the country and into markets in Europe and the United States, prosecutors said.

Authorities cited one episode in 1997, when Taliban officials seized a truckload of drugs. When they discovered the cargo belonged to Noorzai, it was returned “with personal apologies from Mullah Mohammad Omar, the leader of the Taliban,” the indictment said.

Kelley refused to comment on reports that the defendant has ties to the al-Qaida terrorist network.

“It’s not something that’s part of the case,” Kelley said.

Last year, the White House added Noorzai and nine other people and organizations to the most wanted list, bringing the number of those designated on the list to 48 since it was started in 2000. The White House gave Noorzai’s name as Haji Bashir Noorzai.

Under the 1999 Drug Kingpin Act, drug traffickers and their related businesses identified on the list are denied access to the U.S. financial system and all trade and transactions involving U.S. companies and individuals.

The Taliban militia ruled Afghanistan until it was toppled by the United States in late 2001. Taliban-led militants are still operating along Afghanistan’s mountainous eastern border with Pakistan.

Gen. Zaher Akbar, head of a U.S.-funded Afghan police unit charged with destroying Afghan opium crops, said Afghan authorities “appreciate the arrest of drug smugglers anywhere in the world, so long as there is proof against them and they are not just released the next day.”