Police in the southern state of Texas have arrested a U.S. soldier after finding possible bomb-making material in a motel room near Fort Hood.

An FBI spokesman said the soldier, 21-year-old Nasser Jason Abdo, was taken into custody Wednesday in Killeen, Texas, after authorities got a tip about a suspicious individual.

The FBI said Thursday agents found weapons and smokeless gunpowder in Abdo's motel room but that he was being held on unrelated child pornography charges.

Officials said Abdo had disappeared from his assigned base, Fort Campbell, in the eastern state of Kentucky, on July 4.

The U.S. army had granted Abdo conscientious objector status to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in June, but that designation had been put on hold following the child pornography charges.

Fort Hood was the scene of a deadly shooting in November 2009 that killed 13 people and wounded 32 others.

A U.S. Army psychiatrist, Major Nidal Hasan, is standing trial in military court for the incident and faces the death penalty if convicted.

U.S. officials have linked Hasan to a radical Muslim cleric in Yemen. Hasan was paralyzed from the waist down after being shot by police on the day of the rampage and remains in jail.