NY- The New York Post told reporter Andy Geller not to come to work for a month after the newspaper discovered he copied massive sections of an article from The New York Times, sources at the Post confirmed yesterday.

Geller was suspended last week when the Post discovered the plagiarism in an article he wrote about Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s shadowy path toward terror, published following his death this month.

The Post refused to comment on Geller’s suspension.

“The New York Post will not discuss their internal management issues,” Post spokesman Howard Rubenstein said.

A Times spokeswoman declined to comment.

Geller’s piece and The Times article ran the same day, June 9. But The Times article appeared on its Web site the night before.

In recounting Zarqawi’s youth, the two articles shared the same structure, many phrasings and even some of the same quotes.

“He was not so big, but he was bold,” both newspapers quoted a cousin as saying.

Both newspapers noted that Zarqawi “strutted around in Afghan dress and a woolly” hat; and seemed “adrift” in his mid-20s until he became a journalist, writing about the “battles he had missed.”

The news of Geller’s suspension comes just a day after revelations that the Post’s Page Six editor Richard Johnson and two other reporters will speak to prosecutors about shamed gossip columnist Jared Paul Stern.