AT ONE point in his explosive appearance in a Virginia courtroom last Monday, Zacarias Moussaoui cracked a joke. The man accused of being the “20th hijacker” in the attacks of September 11, 2001, was outlining the exceptions to Islamic laws against lying.

A Muslim was entitled to lie about jihad (holy war) and to encourage reconciliation, said the would-be terrorist whose life is hanging on a jury’s verdict expected this week. He could also lie “if a wife asks her husband, ‘Am I beautiful?’ and the wife is 60 years old”.

Sitting across the high-security federal courtroom in Alexandria, Virginia, Judge Leonie Brinkema — who is 61 — permitted herself a rare smile. The main question as the jury adjourned on Friday evening without reaching a verdict was whether Moussaoui had succeeded in turning his trial into a bigger but much sicker joke.

Moussaoui was arrested in Minnesota a month before 9/11 after arousing suspicions as he learnt how to fly a Boeing 747. The US government has argued that by failing to warn FBI agents of the attacks, he became eligible for execution as a party to mass murder.

After years of denying that he knew anything about the timing of 9/11, Moussaoui took to the witness stand on Monday and practically invited the jury to vote for his execution. Standing before the court in a green prison jumpsuit and white skullcap, Moussaoui dumbfounded his defence by proclaiming that he was “supposed to pilot a plane to hit the White House”.

Not only did Moussaoui confess to everything the prosecution had accused him of, he added a new detail that neither the US nor British intelligence communities believes. He said his co-conspirator in the hijacking plan was Richard Reid, the British “shoe bomber” sentenced to life imprisonment after trying to blow up a transatlantic jet in December 2001.

The outburst transformed a trial that had featured a series of blunders by government prosecutors and a frank recognition by many relatives of 9/11 victims that, whatever his warped ambitions to become a killer of Americans, Moussaoui may have been a self-aggrandising Al-Qaeda nonentity.

All that changed when Moussaoui decided to testify. Yet one of the main pieces of evidence that Moussaoui’s “confession” was bogus — and may have been aimed at persuading the jury to collaborate in his effective suicide — was his relationship with Reid, according to US intelligence sources convinced the British bomber had nothing to do with 9/11.

It emerged this weekend that Reid wrote to Moussaoui in October 2002 — when both men were in prison — offering to help his defence. The letter indicates Reid was ready to testify that Moussaoui was not involved in the 9/11 plot.

The jury was given the weekend off when it failed to reach a verdict on Friday afternoon, after 12½ hours of deliberation. Legal sources said Moussaoui’s jury had little way of knowing the true nature of his relationship with Reid. The two would-be terrorists attended Brixton mosque in south London at different times.

Interrogators later established that Reid and Moussaoui had both trained at the Khalden camp in Afghanistan where Al-Qaeda housed its international brigade of volunteers. But the real 9/11 hijackers were trained at al-Matar camp, where an Osama Bin Laden lieutenant named Abu Turab al-Urduni taught mostly Saudi and Yemeni volunteers how to slit the throats of aircraft crew. According to testimony presented last week, al-Urduni made the men practise on sheep and camels.

In an attempt to salvage their case, Moussaoui’s lawyers presented testimony from Al-Qaeda leaders who dismissed him as a fool. One described Moussaoui as “very troubled, not right in the head”; others said he was dumped from operations as a security risk.

The notion that Moussaoui and Reid were central to the 9/11 conspiracy — and had been entrusted with the task of destroying the White House — was “pretty fantastical”, one Washington official said. “If there had ever been any evidence that Reid was in any way connected to this, the Feds would be all over him,” the official added. Another source said there were no plans to interview Reid about the allegations.

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