This apparent display of indifference has been punctuated at the end of each session by the confessed conspirator of the September 11 attacks habitually shouting out some piece of abuse directed at America.
The defence team, which he repeatedly disowned, sought to use such behaviour as evidence of his psychological detachment from the rest of the world and his own fate in it. This, they say, was a consequence of a troubled youth in France pockmarked by racism, brainwashing by Islamic extremists in Britain and his family’s schizophrenic traits.
They had portrayed him as a flakey, incompetent al-Qaeda recruit, possibly hell-bent on killing Americans — but not very good at it. He was, in the words of his defence lawyer, “the operative who couldn’t shoot straight”. Neither an Osama bin Laden nor the attack leader Mohammed Atta, he is, according to the defence, more like Private Pike in Dad’s Army.
Even the prosecution struggled to portray Moussaoui as more than a second-wave reservist for 9/11, part of al- Qaeda’s dodgy division along with others seen by the leadership as too “western”, such as Richard Reid, the British “shoe-bomber”.
It was easy to portray him as a pitiable figure. Easy, that is, until he opened his mouth and showed himself to be perfectly cast as a monstrous figure straight out of America’s collective nightmare.
His two appearances on the witness stand were interpreted as a suicidal attempt for martyrdom by a man seeking to matter in death in a way that he could never manage in life.
His first testimony saw Moussaoui claim that he had, contrary to previous assertions and evidence from elsewhere, been part of the 9/11 plot. Together with Reid, he was supposed to hijack a fifth aircraft and fly it into the White House, only to be foiled by his arrest in August 2001. This undoubtedly helped the prosecution to win stage one of the sentencing trial, in which jurors decided that he was eligible for execution because the lies he told the FBI before the 9/11 attacks had helped to cause the death of innocents.
But the court also saw chillingly authentic evidence obtained from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who masterminded the 9/11 attacks. This showed that Moussaoui was regarded as too unreliable to be a member of his elite group. Nor was he the “20th hijacker” as has sometimes been reported.
The prosecution was eventually forced to acknowledge that Moussaoui was probably lying in claiming that he and Reid had been lined up to attack the White House. After all, why should Reid have made a will naming Moussaoui as his chief beneficiary if they were planning to die together? The second phase of the trial was about identifying a long list of aggravating and mitigating factors in deciding whether his crimes warranted Moussaoui dying by lethal injection. This meant hearing harrowing testimony from victims’ families.
When Moussaoui, much to the despair of the defence team, took the stand for a second time, he was asked how he felt when he heard such testimony or saw widows weeping. “Make my day!” he replied. He had “no remorse, no regrets”, wishing instead that it could be 9/11 again and again, only this time with more people dying.
The prosecution’s closing statement made much of these remarks, saying: “It is time to put an end to his hatred and venom . . . it is time to sentence Zacarias Moussaoui to death.” A huge board showing the names of the 2,972 victims from 9/11 was placed in the jury’s chamber as they considered their verdict.
But some members of the jury voted down yesterday the charge that he was responsible for all these deaths. Three of them wrote on their verdict form a mitigating factor that had not been proposed by the defence: that Moussaoui had little knowledge of the 9/11 plot.
Moussaoui’s testimony had been filled with contradictions. On more than one occasion he made it clear that he wanted to live; on others he appeared to put his faith in a dream that President Bush would pardon him and he would fly back to London. Sometimes he showed intelligence, humour and even self-awareness. For instance, he won laughs from the jury as he recounted how he had almost forgotten to be an angry al-Qaeda terrorist with a man who set up his computer in jail. “He gave me a session. I said, ‘Bye-bye’ — uh, I mean — ‘God curse you’. ”
The defence saw all this as further evidence that he was schizophrenic, a claim not supported by the jury yesterday. His own diagnosis of his mental health was that he is “crazy for 72 virgins!”, a reference to the reward in heaven that supposedly awaits a Muslim martyr. Such antics, combined with the mundane surroundings of the court in Alexandria, Virginia, which more closely resembled a local council chamber than the Old Bailey, made it possible sometimes to forget that his life hung in the balance.
Moussaoui’s outbursts, peppered as they were with references to Hollywood movies and pop songs, indicated that his hatred of the West was not that of a Middle Eastern jihadist. Instead, it appeared born of something more familiar to British ears — the European experience of the alienated immigrant. Sheikh Mohammed himself was suspicious of the amount of time he had spent in Europe, saying: “Westerners have a different point of view because of their freedom.”
Moussaoui’s mother, Aicha El-Wafi, had been forced into an arranged marriage in her native Morocco when she was 14, and soon discovered her husband, Omar, to be a violent drunkard who broke her jaw on one occasion with his bare fists.
They moved to France and produced four children, the youngest being Zacarias, born in the southwestern fishing port of Saint-Jean-de-Luz in 1968.
Three years later, after leaving Moussaiou’s father, Mrs El-Wafi placed the children in an orphanage until she found a job as a cleaner. In 1979 the family moved to Narbonne, where Moussaoui, known then as “Zac”, was good at sports and apparently popular with other teenagers.
He smoked, drank, went to parties and showed scant interest in religion. Unlike many beurs — the children of North African immigrants — he mixed with white French teenagers, including Fanny, a girl with whom he had a steady relationship.
But, according to his brother, Abd-Samad, Zac was never fully accepted by his Gallic acquaintances, including Fanny’s father, who refused to countenance him as a son-in-law.
It did not stop him studying: he obtained two professional qualifications and, in 1991, a degree from Montpellier University.
But the following year he broke up with Fanny, rowed with his mother and headed for London. It was, his family believe, a journey that would ultimately lead to the courtroom in Virginia.
He enrolled at South Bank University for a masters degree in business studies. There, fellow student Nil Plant remembered him as friendly and ambitious. “He wasn’t a proper Arab or a French boy either. He was sort of stuck in between, belonging to nowhere. He had a lot going for him, but nowhere to go.”
It was then that he fell in with a group of fellow foreign students, most from a similar North African background, who suggested he join them at their mosque. His personality swiftly changed. He became sullen and aggressive. Worshippers at Brixton mosque remember him growing a beard and wearing Arab robes. He would disrupt sermons and began attending lectures given by radical preachers.
In 1995 he made his first trip to a training camp in Afghanistan and also fought in Chechnya, where his best friend from London was killed.
Returning to Britain, Moussaoui persuaded Reid to join him in the swell of young Muslims visiting Finsbury Park mosque to hear Abu Hamza. Moussaoui’s Brixton flat became a sanctuary for fellow radicals, including at least half a dozen men later jailed for their links to terror groups.
His mother still keeps a graduation day photograph of her son in his blue robes by her bedside. “He never talked about religion until he got to London,” she told The Times. “The men who deserve punishment are the extremists in London who brainwashed him.”
There certainly are others more deserving of punishment, including several who have spent years in US military custody such as Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi Binashibh, a close associate of Atta, and Mohamed al-Kahtani, the real 20th hijacker.
The US Government says they cannot yet be prosecuted because they are all yielding valuable intelligence information. Perhaps, but others suspect that 4½ years after the event, the real reason they have not been put on trial is because the process of yielding such information — through dubious interrogation techniques such as water-boarding — means their case would be thrown out by any US court worthy of the name.
Instead, America was given the Zacarias Moussaoui show. It has, perhaps, served as a catharsis for a country still traumatised by the events of 9/11. Since the trial began the bones of more than 400 victims have been discovered on the roof of a building near Ground Zero while cinema audiences have begun re-living the horrors of that day with the release of the film Flight 93.
But the real life drama played out on the seventh floor of the Courthouse in Alexandria was, above all, intended to serve the political interests of the Bush Administration: it desperately needed to prosecute someone for 9/11 and remind a jaded American public what the war on terror is all about.
Yesterday Moussaoui was back to his usual tricks, shouting out after the verdict: “America, you lost! . . . I won!” Even though his life has been spared, Moussaoui will now disappear into the darkest bowels of the US prison system and he is unlikely to be heard from again. It is not much of a victory. Nor, to anyone who observed him in court, was it one of his making.
YEARS IN COURT
2001
February 26-May 29 At Oklahoma flight school
August 17 Arrested at a Minnesota flight school after asking to learn to fly a Boeing 747
September 11 Attacks in New York and Washington; Moussaoui held as material witness
December 11 Charged with six conspiracy counts related to September 11
2002
January 2 Refuses to plead; judge enters innocent plea
March 28 Prosecutors announce they will seek the death penalty
June 13 Moussaoui allowed to represent himself, proclaims innocence
July 25 Tries to plead guilty
2003
July 14 Justice Department refuses to let Moussaoui question detained al-Qaeda leaders
2004
April 22 A federal appeals court says Moussaoui can use government-prepared summaries from detained al-Qaeda leaders
2005
Jan 10 Moussaoui’s lawyers appeal to Supreme Court
April 22 Pleads guilty to all six charges
2006
Feb 6 Court selects 85 people from northern Virginia for a jury to decide whether Moussaoui gets the death penalty or life
