Jurors in the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui were forced today to relive the final minutes of Flight 93, brought down in a field in Pennsylvania on 9/11 as desperate passengers tried to regain control of the cockpit.

The jurors were played a cockpit recording from the flight beginning with Ziad Jarrah, the leader of the hijackers, telling the 33 passengers that there was a bomb aboard: "Ladies and gentlemen: here the captain, please sit down, keep remaining sitting. We have a bomb on board, so sit."

The recording comes to an end some 30 minutes later with noises of the hijackers trying to throw off an attack by the passengers and one of them asking: "Shall we finish it off?"

Moments later, the plane hurtles out of control to the ground. The final sound on the tape is a hijacker saying: "Allah is the greatest."

It is the first time that the recording has been aired in public as federal prosecutors try to persuade the jury at a district court in Alexandria, Virginia, that Moussaoui, a self-confessed al-Qaeda conspirator, deserves the death sentence.

Despite a warning from Judge Leonie Brinkema that too much highly emotional evidence could leave a death sentence open to appeal, many on the jury have been visibly reduced to tears during a week of heart-rending recordings, photographs and harrowing first-person accounts from those caught up in the September 11 attacks.

But the Flight 93 recording was the most anticipated piece of evidence and was accompanied by a video presentation that simultaneously showed the flight path, speed and heading in a mock-up similar to a flight simulator, allowing jurors to immerse themselves fully in the drama.

According to extracts from the recording published by the 9/11 Commission, the United Airlines flight was hijacked at 9:28am on September 11, 46 minutes into its scheduled journey from Newark, New Jersey, to San Francisco.

After an initial broadcast of "Mayday", the aircraft fell 700ft during a 35-second brawl as the pilots struggled with the four hijackers, before the hijackers gained control.

At least ten of the passengers are then believed to have made their way to the back of the aircraft and called their families on mobile phones. Learning of the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, they resolved to fight back, attacking the cockpit at 9:57am..

That attack forced the hijackers to abort their mission and crash the jet into the ground in a field in western Pennsylvania. According to Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the captured 9/11 mastermind, their target had been the US Capitol.

"The cockpit voice recorder captured the sounds of the passenger assault muffled by the intervening cockpit door," according to the 9/11 Commission's account. "Some family members who listened to the recording report that they can hear the voice of a loved one among the din. We cannot identify those whose voices can be heard. But the assault was sustained."

At one point on the recording played today, an air traffic controller asks, "Is that United 93 calling?"

A translation of the hijackers’ Arabic words was provided to the jury. At one point a hijacker is heard to say "In the name of Allah, most merciful, most compassionate."

Another voice in the cockpit can be heard saying, "Please don’t hurt me. Oh God!" Then a few seconds later somebody says "I don’t want to die!" three times. Then there are what sound like groans in the cockpit.

Then, a couple of minutes later, as the plane turns back towards Washington, the voice of a hijiacker says "Everything is fine. I finished."

Moussaoui, a Moroccan-born Frenchman, is the only person to have been charged in the United States over the attacks on September 11, 2001 and the jurors have already declared him eligible for the death penalty by determining that his actions caused at least one death on 9/11.

Even though he was in jail in Minnesota at the time of the attacks, the jury ruled that lies told by Moussaoui to federal agents a month before the attacks kept them from identifying and stopping some of the hijackers. Now they must decide whether Moussaoui deserves execution or life in prison.

Moussaoui's defence lawyers, exasperated by his extraordinary confession to the court last week and repeated interruptions - yesterday he shouted "Burn all Pentagon next time" in court - have argued that their client is a failed, mentally unwell hijacker desperate to become a martyr for extremist Islam.

They will present their case in the coming days and are expected to call Richard Reid, the British shoe-bomber, as a witness to contradict Moussaoui's unsubstantiated claim that they were planning to fly a hijacked jet into the White House.

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